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Summary
Summary
Rarely has a scholar attained such popular acclaim merely by doing what he does best and enjoys most. But such is Stephen Jay Gould's command of paleontology and evolutionary theory, and his gift for brilliant explication, that he has brought dust and dead bones to life, and developed an immense following for the seeming arcana of this field. In Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle his subject is nothing less than geology's signal contribution to human thought--the discovery of "deep time," the vastness of earth's history, a history so ancient that we can comprehend it only as metaphor. He follows a single thread through three documents that mark the transition in our thinking from thousands to billions of years: Thomas Burnet's four-volume Sacred Theory of the Earth (1680-1690), James Hutton's Theory of the Earth (1795), and Charles Lyell's three-volume Principles of Geology (1830-1833). Gould's major theme is the role of metaphor in the formulation and testing of scientific theories--in this case the insight provided by the oldest traditional dichotomy of Judeo-Christian thought: the directionality of time's arrow or the immanence of time's cycle. Gould follows these metaphors through these three great documents and shows how their influence, more than the empirical observation of rocks in the field, provoked the supposed discovery of deep time by Hutton and Lyell. Gould breaks through the traditional "cardboard" history of geological textbooks (the progressive march to truth inspired by more and better observations) by showing that Burnet, the villain of conventional accounts, was a rationalist (not a theologically driven miracle-monger) whose rich reconstruction of earth history emphasized the need for both time's arrow (narrative history) and time's cycle (immanent laws), while Hutton and Lyell, our traditional heroes, denied the richness of history by their exclusive focus upon time's Arrow.
Reviews (1)
Kirkus Review
From time to time, the noted Harvard paleontologist departs from the brief essay mode, reflections on Darwin, political treatises opposing racism or ""creation science,"" and adopts the pure scholarly mode of exegesis on a text. The current work falls into that category and recalls the earlier Ontogeny and Phylogeny in its originality and depth. The object of Gould's fascination is geology and the passage from the earlier belief of a young earth and a literal reading of Genesis, to the present understanding of a geologically ""deep time""--a phrase Gould likes and has adopted from New Yorker resident geologist John McPhee. ""Deep time"" means a planet whose age is measured in millions of years--time enough to create mountains and canyons, move continents, cut deep ocean trenches. Contemporary geologists regard deep time as historical time symbolized by the arrow pointing from time past to time future; it is also the time referent in the Judeo-Christian tradition in which Moses and Jesus are regarded as historical figures. Deep time can also be regarded as cyclical time, however, the eternal return of eastern mysticism, a nonhistorical recycling with no beginning or end. What Gould does is to examine these metaphors of time as reflected in three seminal works of geology: Thomas Burnet's 17th-century Sacred Theory of the Earth. James Hutton's Theory of the Earth (1795), and Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830-33). And what he does is upset the scholarly apple cart by asserting that present-day geology texts largely misinterpret the ideas of these men, a misreading that hinges on the metaphor of time. So Burnet--conventionally condemned as a pious biblical literalist--is resurrected as a rational thinker who searched for natural causes for the things recorded in the Testaments. Gould focuses on the frontispiece of Burnet's volume to illustrate how Burnet reconciled time's arrow and time's cycle. In essence, the earth spirals, undergoing historical changes so that successive cycles never repeat what has gone before. Hutton is revealed to be a master cyclist: the earth is a machine without history. The reason geologists do not see him in this light may in part be because they have not read him (a ""legendary unreadability,"" Gould avers), and instead relied on Charles Playfair, who popularized Hutton's notions of geology but allowed a sense of history to creep in. Lastly, Lyell--the chronicler of ""uniformitarianism"" (natural forces act today as they have always done) turns out also to be a master expositor of the cycle metaphor. There is much to delight in Gould's revisionist history, told as always in grand style. There is also a not-so-hidden agenda. By casting the 18th and 19th centuries with wonderfully rich characters, Gould has done much to soften the textbook dichotomies of good guys vs. bad guys and restored the reputation of catastrophism--which ties in neatly with Gould's and Eldrige's punctuated equilibria theory of evolution. Fuel for the fire then, as well as perceptions of value in the social history of science. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
