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SUMMARY:Was geology the first science to inject history into the natural w
 orld? - Martin Rudwick (Department of History and Philosophy of Science)
DTSTART:20160218T153000Z
DTEND:20160218T170000Z
UID:TALK63502@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Marta Halina
DESCRIPTION:My _Earth's Deep History_ (Chicago\, 2014) is an attempt to su
 mmarise historical research on what I see as an unduly neglected theme of 
 outstanding importance in the _longue durée_ of the natural sciences: the
  reconstruction of the past _history_ of nature\, and of our human place i
 n it\, as opposed to (or at least\, in contrast to) time-independent _caus
 al_ explanations of natural processes and events. I argue that this histor
 icisation was first attempted in the science that came to be called 'geolo
 gy'\, and that it later spread to other natural sciences. My book was desi
 gned to be accessible to the 'general reader' and has not yet been widely 
 reviewed by historians of the sciences\, so I would like to get the semina
 r's reactions to its main arguments. I start with C17 chronologists such a
 s Scaliger and Ussher\, whom I treat as serious world-historians\; and I a
 rgue that C17 naturalists such as Hooke and Steno exemplify a crucial tran
 sposition of the chronologists' historical methods and concepts from human
  history into the natural world. I regard the late C18 and early C19 as th
 e pivotal period (which is why I focussed on it in most of my earlier and 
 more detailed books)\, because it was then that naturalists such as Cuvier
  – and specifically those then newly called 'geologists'\, such as Buckl
 and and Lyell – worked out in practice _how_ to interpret natural eviden
 ce in detail and comprehensively in terms of nature's history (and Darwin\
 , initially a geologist\, later transposed this into the organic world). I
  conclude with the period from the later C19 to the present\, arguing that
  new radiometric dating methods\, for example\, were significant less for 
 expanding the Earth's timescale than for giving precision to a new picture
  of the Earth's eventful history\, with mobile continents\, mass extinctio
 ns\, global ice ages\, an evolving atmosphere and so on. In the late C20 E
 arth scientists adopted a still wider perspective in which the Earth's his
 tory became just one instance of diverse _planetary_ histories\, and geolo
 gy's historical methodology was transposed into (or at least\, it was para
 lleled in) astronomy and cosmology. (I treat modern American 'young-Earth'
  creationism as a sideshow closely analogous to flat-Earthism\, and I rele
 gate it to a brief appendix.)
LOCATION:Seminar Room 2\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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