*1. The Discovery of Deep Time * Deep Time * Myths of Deep Time * On Dichotomy * Time's Arrow and Time's Cycle * Caveats *2. Thomas Burnet's Battleground of Time * Burner's Frontispiece * The Burnet of Textbooks * Science versus Religion? * Burnet's Methodology * The Physics of History * Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Conflict and Resolution * Burnet and Steno as Intellectual Partners in the Light of Time's Arrow and Time's Cycle *3. James Hutton's Theory of the Earth: A Machine without a History * Picturing the Abyss of Time * Hutton's World Machine and the Provision of Deep Time * The Hutton of Legend * Hutton Disproves His Legend * The Sources of Necessary Cyclicity * Hutton's Paradox: Or, Why the Discoverer of Deep Time Denied History * Borges's Dilemma and Hutton's Motto * Playfair: A Boswell with a Difference * A Word in Conclusion and Prospect *4. Charles Lyell, Historian of Time's Cycle * The Case of Professor Ichthyosaurus * Charles Lyell, Self-Made in Cardboard * Lyell's Rhetorical Triumph: The Miscasting of Catastrophism * Lyell's Defense of Time's Cycle * Lyell, Historian of Time's Cycle * The Partial Unraveling of Lyell's World View * Epilogue *5. Boundaries * Hampton's Throne and Burnet's Frontispiece * The Deeper Themes of Arrows and Cycles * Bibliography * Index
Stephen Jay Gould was Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology at Harvard University and Vincent Astor Visiting Professor of Biology at New York University. A MacArthur Prize Fellow, he received innumerable honors and awards and wrote many books, including Ontogeny and Phylogeny and Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle (both from Harvard).
The blasphemous and dwarfing revelation of ‘deep time’ forms the
underlying drama of [this book]… In the monthly essays with which
Gould has been amusing and edifying the readers of Natural History
magazine for some fifteen years, he now and then shows a
surprisingly fond acquaintance with the debunked and forgotten
theories that litter the history of science: the present book, an
expanded version of lectures given at Hebrew University in
Jerusalem, considers three early British geologists—Thomas Brunet
(1635–1715), James Hutton (1726–1797) and Charles Lyell
(1797–1875)—who he feels have been misrepresented in the
contemporary textbook version of geology’s progress… Gould’s lucid
animated style, rarely slowed by even a touch of the ponderous,
leads us deftly through the labyrinth of faded debates and
perceptions… Gould, with a passion that approaches the lyrical,
argues for a retrospective tolerance in science and against
fashions that would make heroes and villains of men equally
committed to the cause of truth and equally immersed in the
metaphors and presumptions of their culture and time.
*New Yorker*
This new work arises from Gould’s delivery of the first series of
Harvard–Jerusalem lectures presented at Hebrew University in April
1985. It is a highly individualistic document (Gould admits it to
be ‘a quest for personal understanding’) and sometimes discursive
(the book opens within the works of Sigmund Freud and closes
outside the south front of the Cathedral of our Lady of Chartres),
but it is always highly readable… Vastly entertaining and
stimulating… Gould’s subject here is geological time; he is
concerned with aspects of the discovery of what John McPhee has
appropriately termed ‘deep time’… Underlying the entire book,
however, lurks yet another and still deeper theme which should
commend the work to a readership far wider than historians of ideas
and of science. Gould both explicitly and implicitly demonstrates
that science is a creation of human minds which are ever feeling
the influence of pressures far removed from those natural phenomena
that are laid out before the scientist’s gaze.
*Nature*
In [this book], Gould has turned to the history of geology, a field
very close to his main concerns as a paleontologist. He offers a
revisionist historical account of the discovery of geological time.
If anyone suspects that Gould has at last written a book on a
rather dry historical question, I should emphasize that he has hit
upon a rich subject and has written a highly perceptive and
fascinating book. Furthermore, his latest volume offers his readers
a valuable insight into his wider intellectual vision, providing
them with a literary blueprint for a number of the basic concerns
that unite his many essays and books. To understand Gould one
should read his new book.
*New York Times Book Review*
Gould provides a fascinating, informally written excursion into the
ways we conceptualize the past. He explores a central dichotomy
between time’s arrow (a unilinear Newtonian succession of unique
events) and time’s cycle (the recursive patterns that reappear in a
world that remains fundamentally unchanged)… With its accessible
style and its range of subjects, the book will be read by the same
wide audience that has enjoyed Gould’s earlier collections of
essays… [The book] carries an enthusiasm, intelligence, and sense
of purpose that render it a worthy follower to Gould’s earlier
work. Entertaining, sometimes annoying, highly personal, but never
dull, this is the shortest of Gould’s books, but also his most
adventurous and experimental.
*Times Higher Education Supplement*
Gould’s unabashed enthusiasm transforms his material. Every page
pulses with his own excitement at seizing a subject so personally
satisfying to him… This slim book, so plainly the product of one
man’s love for his subject, did not ‘have’ to be written—but leaves
us grateful that it was.
*Los Angeles Herald-Examiner*
Gould, geologist, paleontologist, and zoologist, is one of those
relatively rare men of science who has gained a deep insight into
the nature of his science and who has also developed a sense of
history that is uncommon among scientists… Time’s Arrow, Time’s
Cycle ought to be on the required reading list of every geologist
and every student of the science.
*American Scientist*
Geological time, its enormousness and humankind’s place in it, is
the great intellectual contribution of geology. In his latest book,
Stephen Jay Gould shows us how its discovery embraced both time’s
cycle and time’s arrow, and how, because these metaphors went
unrecognized, we misinterpret geologic discoveries. Gould’s style
will be familiar to his readers—the historical snippets, the
dichotomies, the odd and unusual, the common, the startling, and
the contrary are all here.
*New Scientist*
In his painstaking yet engaging manner, Gould examines three
central documents in the evolution of our notions about geological
time. These works have been connected wrongly, Gould finds, in an
arrowlike progression of their own, from religious notions of
Earth’s creation as God’s fast work to empirically based theories
of slow, steady changes… Gould’s chosen task is significant
nonetheless—setting the record of that discovery arrow-straight.
He’s done that in his unusual book with his usual charm and
erudition.
*Smithsonian*
What you read in textbooks and what your teachers told you is
really wrong, Gould expounds. All this is a lot of fun, and there
is such history and philosophy to intellectually chew on in this
book… As we have come to expect from Gould, this book is
interesting and clear.
*American Journal of Physical Anthropology*
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