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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. Thus, this work is both an account
of geology's greatest discovery and a philosophical commentary on the nature of
scientific thought. Science, it argues, is not so very different from other forms
of learning, led not by the brute force of inductivism but by the use of all the
curious tools of inference that the mind encompasses. Time's
Arrow, Time's Cycle is a stunning book that will captivate anyone curious
about the temporal order of the universe and the human mind's struggle to understand
it.
Stephen J. Gould is Professor of Geology, and Curator of Invertebrate
Paleontology and Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology in the Museum of Comparative
Zoology, Harvard University. Among his previous books are Ontogeny and Phylogeny
(Harvard University Press,1977), Ever Since Darwin, The Panda's Thumb,
The Mismeasure of Man, Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes, and The
Flamingo's Smile. |
