Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle - Flimsy 'cardboard'

Flimsy 'cardboard'

Standard textbook accounts of the achievements of these three figures have long provided what Gould describes as a "self-serving mythology." These flimsy "cardboard" accounts vaunt the superiority of empiricism and inductivism over the scientific nemesis of religious bigotry.

This legend as perpetuated by geology textbooks over the last century claims that geology remained in the service of the Mosaic story of creation so long as armchair geological theorists refused to place fieldwork ahead of scriptural authority. Thomas Burnet was just such an archetypical religious spokesman. A century later, Hutton heroically broke with this biblical zealotry by arguing that geological evidence must rest upon a solid empirical foundation. The Earth's strata, when carefully examined, betray "no vestige of a beginning—no prospect of an end." But Hutton was far ahead of his time. So it was not until Charles Lyell published the Principles of Geology that geologists finally came to accept Hutton's basic message and banished miraculous intervention, catastrophes, and biblical deluges from their science.

Having elaborated this bit of scientific melodrama, Gould proceeds to demolish it by showing that the actualities of Hutton's and Lyell's work were the opposite of the textbook legend. His intention is not simply to debunk the textbook legend, which has already been debunked by historians such as Martin J. S. Rudwick. He sets out to rectify the error and show the real sources of inspiration in the development of deep time which have not been properly understood.