Undeniable by Bill Nye Read Free Book Online Page B

of fossil bones. Nobody knew the true age of Earth, and the majority of the ancient creatures we know about today had not yet been discovered. There were no museums full of dinosaur bones; there were probably never any casual dinner conversations about the physiological parallels between humans and chickens. Darwin lived when the ideas that so captivated me as a kid were just beginning to take shape in academic circles.
    For many centuries, people in Europe and elsewhere had taken as gospel (perhaps more accurately, from Gospel) that the world had always been pretty much the way it looked right then. But in the late eighteenth century, several thinkers started to question long-held beliefs. The Scottish naturalist James Hutton studied Earth and its natural processes. He is generally regarded as humankind’s first geologist. He reconsidered the idea that Earth has always looked the way it does right now. His writing is hard for me to follow sometimes, as it’s in florid prose no doubt designed to impress his colleagues, but try this one: “Time, which measures everything in our idea, and is often deficient to our schemes, is to nature endless and as nothing…”
    I would rewrite his idea in this way: “Time is part of our thinking in everything we do, and often we seem to have too little of it; in nature, though, there is no limit to the amount of time available…” This insight led Hutton to realize that the landforms he observed were not the product of a creator clocking in for just six days of work and then heading off for a little R & R. Instead, the geology that Hutton observed and documented was clearly the result of countless years of steady change. He rejected the standard story that there had been a great flood, leaving just a few thousand years of history to create everything we see today. Instead, he deduced that there had been slow, continual change of Earth’s surface for eons and eons.
    Hutton’s idea is called “uniformitarianism,” and it was one of the crucial insights on which Darwin built his theory of evolution. Uniformitarianism denotes the idea that the world is uniform, or consistent with one set of natural laws; it connotes another idea that the natural laws we deduce today are the same natural laws that applied eons and millennia ago. It’s quite a departure from what Hutton’s contemporaries believed (and what creationists today still do). They believed that a creator could change natural laws to suit her, him, or itself. By necessity, then, natural laws and the natural history of Earth could not be uniform. It was to both Ned Nye Boy Scientist and Bill Nye the Science Guy a completely unreasonable point of view. But, we have the benefit of another century of human thought to influence our reasoning.
    By the 1830s, the British scholar Charles Lyell elaborated on Hutton’s work. I like to say Lyell calibrated the world. He measured how quickly (or slowly) sediments were laid down. He estimated the age of rock layers by measuring them and integrating one age or period of time with another. He was establishing the timescale of Earth. Lyell wrote clearly and with insight into the nature of the enormous spans of time involved. Charles Darwin carried Lyell’s Principles of Geology with him on his famous voyage around the world aboard the HMS Beagle . Several geologists that I know have a copy of Lyell’s book on their office bookshelves even today. It stands the test of (deep) time.
    Hutton and Lyell were pushing against a strong academic tradition that looked at the world in totally different, static terms. If you visit the Smithsonian Museum of American History today, you’ll come across a statue of George Washington by Horatio Greenough, unveiled in 1841. Even as a kid, I thought the statue looked a little odd. I mean, George Washington didn’t wear an ancient Greek chlamys (toga thing)—did he? In this statue, he does. So