Earth’s Deep History
Three things annoy Martin Rudwick about the way the history of Earth science is portrayed. He hates the caricature that pits science against religion and he scorns monoglot provincialism. He also disdains hero-worship. So I hope he forgives my 21 year-old self for making the pilgrimage to London in 1977 to hear him speak at The Geological Society, and ask him to autograph my copy of Living and Fossil Brachiopods.
Then, Rudwick had only lately switched from palaeontology to history of science, where he has forged a second, even more distinguished career. As this is also a favourite area of mine, I have continued to read him with an enthusiasm that remains undimmed after this, his latest book.
In 2005 and 2008 Rudwick published two magisterial tomes, entitled Bursting the Limits of Time and Worlds Before Adam. These volumes burst the limits of my briefcase and contributed greatly to my upper-body strength as well as my understanding; but although Rudwick’s elegant prose is never hard work, such monumental scale is daunting.
It is therefore welcome that the arguments developed in these mighty works have now been condensed (and expanded to bring us up to date) into this more portable account of the human appreciation of time. His premise, shared with Stephen Jay Gould, is that humanity’s discovery of Earth’s immense age is an unsung ‘dethronement’, to use Sigmund Freud’s image of the way science progressively removes human beings from the centre.
By the 18th Century, western culture had long accepted that the Earth had begun a few millennia earlier (possibly 4004BC, following Archbishop Ussher - a serious chronologist who did not deserve his post-Darwinian ridicule, Rudwick points out), and that humans had always been part of it. Rudwick’s account of how natural philosophers across Europe came to realise the Earth’s antiquity reveals that, far from being stifled by Judaeo-Christian thought, they were profoundly aided by adopting the methods and thought of traditional, Christian, historical and antiquarian scholars.
Reading nature as innately historical had profound consequences. For Darwin, species were not perfect, finished objects in neat taxonomic boxes, but represented the cut ends of a tangled skein of historical threads, linking all to the origin of life. This view of species derived from his geologist’s instinct that all things embody a historical narrative.
Our species’ relegation to time’s fringes surely merits, as a scientific revolution, proper respect. I didn’t need convincing. This wonderful book will leave many more in no doubt.
Reviewed by Ted Nield
EARTH’S DEEP HISTORY – HOW IT WAS DISCOVERED AND WHY IT MATTERS by MARTIN RUDWICK November 2014 Published by: Chicago UP. ISBN 9780226203935 (cloth) 392pp. List Price: £21.00. W: www.press.uchicago.edu/index.html