If we could travel back in time to the quaint English town of Lyme Regis early in the 19th century, we might meet some locals who spoke quietly and earnestly, at times disapprovingly, of an
odd child seen roaming the beaches and cliffs, always poking around in the dirt, lugging around buckets of worthless rocks, a pick and shovel in hand. Yet despite the dire prognostications of neighbors, this burgeoning amateur geologist would make astounding discoveries, starting at the tender age of eleven! The youngster would go on to be one of the greatest pioneers of early paleontology. But few would recognize the name today. How could someone be called one of the greatest 'fossilists' of all time and remain so obscure? Well, she was
just a girl ...
If there was ever a single group of our fellow human beings that had reason for grievance against Biblical Literalism, it's the silent majority, the one which complains the least. In the first few pages of Genesis, no doubt authored by a man, every ill suffered by mankind is laid conveniently at the feet of Eve. Created for man's pleasure from his rib, the scapegoat for all original sin, and portrayed throughout the Old Testament as mere breeding vessels barely rising above a beast of burden, women have been systematically marginalized in western culture and ancient near eastern myth alike. I wince to speculate how many generations of young women, many for all we know potential Einsteins or Newtons, were snuffed out in the flower of youth due to religious bias, or just plain sexist bigotry. It was, and remains, a great loss and a moral travesty not just for those unfortunate affected, but for all. And while it's true that in Genesis both man and woman were cursed to suffer for all time, women were
further singled out for an extra measure of torment and Divine Wrath; they would bear children in pain for all eternity, or until they died an agonizing death in delivery. Thus for most of recorded history this greatest of inequities foisted on fully half the population of humanity has resulted in abuse, discrimination, and inhumane denial of women's intellectual endowment; privileges that every man took for granted. It is shameful, it is inexcusable, but all too common. And naturally, in Victorian England of the early 1800s, it was all the rage.
Mary Anning was no rebel, she was simply being true to her nature. Had she been male the epithets describing her would probably ripple and over flow with terms like 'brilliant', 'hard working' or 'revolutionary'. Instead she was labeled rebellious, malcontent, a poor example for proper English ladies; surely it was her parents fault! Born with a keen mind driven by insatiable curiosity, finding herself ironically shut out of a world long dominated by males, Mary would forever be an exile to the science she would help so much to create, forced to work alone in relative obscurity. But even with that against her, she would challenge the scientific community with her finds. For there on the coast of England, Jurassic Sea Serpents of the deep once swam through primeval oceans. And Mary Anning, her skirts permanently stained with soil and mud, would be the first to unearth long vanished, giant ichthyosaurs and long necked plesiosaurs. The Anning family was dirt poor; in fact one could say their entire livelihood was scratched out of the dirt near their home. Mary, along with her mother and brother, eeked out a substandard living by digging out and preparing fossils. It was common practice for titled gentlemen naturalist to buy one of them for a pittance, and take it to London or Paris, then sit back as accolades and congratulations rolled in on the new owner with nary a mention of its true discoverer.
Mary also found innumerable fossils of ammonoids, mollusks, and snails, not quite as exciting as giant sea going reptiles, but so distinctive they were adopted as some of the first index fossils-fossil so unique to a specific time period they were used to calibrate the relative age of rocky beds all over the world where ever they turned up. And in a twist of fate, it would be the small, humdrum fossils of common critters, some of which were pried out of the ground by Mary Anning herself, that would slowly pry loose one of earth's most closely guarded and last great secrets.
Far removed from Lyme Regis, another giant of sorts was becoming known to the scientific community. Born in 1797, the Scottish heir to a local fortune, Charles Lyell had been greatly impressed by the earlier work of unformists Georges Leclerc and James Hutton. Both had had the audacity to suggest that the same slow processes operating on the earth's surface today had in the past, over immense periods of time, crafted the topography of our world. Hutton was also an ardent 'plutonist' who argued that certain types of rocks were the cooled remains of liquefied lava which had been injected into the earth long ago from deep inside. It's worth noting that these early uniformist were willing to include catastrophes of the type they could read about in history or in the geological record. But for the most part, they emphasized gradualism over sudden, dramatic events.
Lyell was most fortunate. Unlike Mary Anning, he had the good sense to be born male as well as rich, and the years following his childhood would prove to be an enchanted time for gentlemen geologists and biologists. His father had bequeathed unto his oldest son not only land and title, but a love of the natural world and a library well stocked with the all the classic volumes of science and mathematics to fan the flames of the young man's inquiry. Lyell was able to gather a powerful array of data because the ruling class of the time routinely sent their college aged children on an educational odyssey then called the grand tour. For Lyell, the grand tour meant a romp around the Mediterranean and parts of Old Europe where both natural stone wonders and some of the oldest structures made by mankind stood in close proximity to one another. What a horrible ordeal to have to endure, huh?
Perhaps Lyell's greatest methodological insight that emerged from his travels came from measuring the effects of water, wind, and seasonal change on manmade monuments and buildings of known age, and then comparing and extrapolating those findings on to natural formations all over Europe and Africa. It was both ingenious and simple, if perhaps derived from experience far too expensive for the common man to undertake! Lyell carefully recorded the data on many trips abroad, and became convinced that slow change could account for his observations in nature. He published his findings, making the case for uniformism and thus indirectly an old earth, in a three volume set titled The Principles of Geology from 1830-1833. Lyell's volumes were a smash hit and he became a regular fixture in what we might now call the University talk show circuit.
The idea of an earth far older than accepted for centuries by Young Earth Creationists now gained momentum rapidly. More geologists jumped on the uniformism band wagon and soon data accumulated from all over the globe supporting Lyell and Hutton's old earth, uniformist views. A number of geologists worked on various methods to date the earth at this time, with the bulk of the resultant figures ranging between a few million and a few hundred million years. The idea of an ancient world millions of years old became known as Deep Time. The paradigm of Deep Time gave a new generation of naturalists the long periods they needed to work with to consider possible hypothesis which might allow dramatic change, i.e., evolution, to take place among plants and animals. Among them were two researchers named Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. After Darwin's own infamous trip abroad on the HMS Beagle and the subsequent treasure load of data he recorded, and after many delays, Darwin would publish a revolutionary book called "The Origin of Species" in 1859 proposing the first plausible method by which species might change and diversify from common ancestors. If not for the work of early geologists like Lyell, Darwin and Wallace would have been reigned in by both the time scales and dogma of Young Earth Literalism.
The first run of Origins was snapped up virtually over night; it was an immediate sensation even outside the confines of the biological and geological community. Darwin's basic reasoning was both elegant and simple enough for most non-specialists to understand: Non-random selection acting on random varying replicators could, over the course of many generations, produce dramatic changes in the appearance and function of organisms. But his thesis contradicted the Biblically supported notion of fixity of species, and in no time a bitter debate erupted with an almost carnival like atmosphere. Mainstream papers carried heated editorial exchanges between supporters and critics for the consumption of the general public. Housewives and barristers followed the new controversy between fundamentalism and science, a disagreement which echoes down the years to this day.
Darwin's idea implied or required an earth several hundred million years of age, and a number of critiques arose challenging this necessity. It's interesting to note that the vast majority of critics, even those motivated by a fondness for Biblical Literalism, rarely proposed the planet was a mere few thousands of years old. The argument was between those who advocated an age of hundreds of millions of years as opposed to those who argued the world was only a few millions of years old.
The Theory of Natural Selection also predicted that transitional fossils would be found in the geological record showing evidence for change and kinship between one type of creature and another. Critics were already jumping on this as a failed prediction, asking rhetorically where were these transitional fossils? They wouldn't have to wait for long ... In one of those eerie rare events in science which makes ones hair stand on end, barely a year after Origins was published, workers in Germany unearthed a strange looking critter with the wings and feathers of a bird, and the teeth and skeleton of a reptile. A more graphic confirmation of Darwin's prediction would be hard to imagine than a half-lizard, half-bird! Archaeopteryx had made its dramatic entrance onto the world stage of biology and geology, made even more startling as it was predicted ahead of time by Darwin and Wallace!
All over Europe and especially in the British Isles, the Industrial Revolution, powered by James Watt's steam engine, was literally 'gearing' up into full swing. With the lucrative industry of mining now booming, and ever more grandiose construction projects in the works, there came a wave of large scale excavation all over Europe on a scale unmatched since the hey-day of the Roman Empire. More and more geologists were being called out to commercial construction sites and mining pits by bewildered engineers and foremen to view the latest incongruous fossils turned up by the shovels of industry.
Young Earth Creationists would have us believe all the strata and fossil material was laid down in a massive global flood, abruptly. But the record was inconveniently turning up evidence which didn't square with the idea by the early to mid 1800s. Mary Anning's sea monsters being but one stellar example.
Geologists found alternating layers of shale, sandstone, and limestone. Lighter, less dense, layers were routinely found underneath heavier beds... this was needless to say an anomaly for Flood scenarios. One would assume the heaviest matter would sink underneath the lighter. They came to understand that sandstone was the eroded grains of rock that was weathered away from outcrops of stone in arid regions, deposited in marine environments, and then buried and lithified. In the middle of a global flood deserts had repeatedly broken out? Shale was the result of fine grained particulate sedimentation in relatively deep and tranquil waters. Limestone was the calcified remains of mostly microscopic creatures and formed mostly in warm, shallow, seas. Even seemingly inert nodules of smooth glassy flint were revealed to be a microscopic graveyard of tiny creatures.
Fossilized footprints were found in all kinds of places, in a bewildering range of shape and size, from insects to dinosaurs, sandwiched between other types of strata. It was difficult to imagine how, in the midst of a global flood and a world covered in water in which the only surviving land animals were safely stored away on Noah's Ark, animals had scurried to and fro across dry land to leave such impressions! Fragile ensembles of coral, structures as delicate as wasp nests or the eggs of small birds were found exquisitely preserved in situ ... wouldn't a massive global flood have churned up and deposited them under tons of crushing rock and silt? Larger remains showed signs of predation and scavenging after they'd died, how would this occur if every living thing that crept on land perished at the same time? It was all leading away from a single massive flooding event and pointing more and more to an ancient earth which had undergone long cycles of changing conditions, glaciations, floods of varying magnitude, catastrophes large and small, and most importantly the humble, slow effects of weathering. Catstrophists posited first one flood, then two, then a flood and volcano combination ... and eventually just gave up trying to explain all the observations with individual catastrophes. By the time Darwin sailed to the Galapagos, traditional Flood Geology and Young Earthism had withered on the vine, and even the more progressive catstrophism, an offshoot from Biblical Literliasm, was in trouble.
Amazingly, it is this discredited old quasi-science of Flood Geology, and not just any old flood, but Noah's Flood, which large segments of the religious right in the US now want to resurrect and have taught as legitimate science. Unable to pass scientific muster, having been junked 150 years ago, the extremists now seek to impose their religious beliefs disguised as science on impressionable children of all races and creeds by Congressional Fatwa ...
~DarkSyde~
Update: Seronimous adds in comments, "the whole "Flood Geology" movement of the time was proposed, examined and then argued out and rejected on the basis of the state of science at the time, evidence and reason by...
Geologist-Theologians of The C of E (Church of England), notably Rev. Sedgwick.
The enemy is not religion, but those who are too ignorant to realize that the world is not only stranger than they imagine, but stranger than they can imagine."
As geological data from every corner of the earth was catalogued in ever greater abundance, some researchers begin to notice something strange. At first it was thought a small coincidence perhaps, nothing terribly important. Some recent finds, mostly run of the mill index fossils of bivalves and snails in North and South America, were virtually identical to specimens found on the English Coast by folks like Mary Anning half a century earlier. Intrigued, geologists began to look more closely and found to their surprise that both the fossil biota and specific types of geological strata on either side of the Atlantic became more and more similar as one dug further into the ground. And eventually, the two records would match up as to appear almost indistinguishable. The resemblance between some of the strata and the fossils from locations on the other side of the planet was uncanny, and eventually too great to ignore. The data seemed to be suggesting that at some remote point in the past, two continental assemblies separated by thousands of miles of ocean had been one and the same ...
In the space of a single century geology had developed from an arcane offshoot of Young Earth Creationism and Flood Theology, into an exciting, productive science. The forces of dogma had been over run finally, by reason. The ramparts of religious oligarchy were stormed, and the new masters threw open the gates of Deep Time, unleashing Darwin's dangerous idea along with hordes of extinct reptilian beasts that thrilled scientist and layman alike. Geoscience now stood poised at the dawn of the 20th century to wrest from nature the answers to the fundamental question of age, and cautiously knock on the door of a far fetched new idea called continental drift.