The mind being but too apt…

The mind being but too apt…

"Strata of Tilgate Forest" from "Illustrations of the Geology of Sussex" (1827)

Originally published 24 July 2005

In the fall of 2003 I walked the prime merid­i­an, the line of zero lon­gi­tude, across south­east­ern Eng­land, vis­it­ing many sites impor­tant to the his­to­ry of sci­ence. An account of that walk is forth­com­ing, in a book titled Walk­ing Zero: Dis­cov­er­ing Cos­mic Space and Time Along the Prime Merid­i­an, to be pub­lished by Walk­er & Co. in 2006.

One stop along the way was the for­mer home of Dr. Gideon Algeron Man­tell, Vic­to­ri­an gen­tle­man geol­o­gist and dis­cov­er­er of the first dinosaur fos­sils. Man­tel­l’s house in the town of Lewes in Sus­sex stands only feet away from the prime meridian.

In Octo­ber 1821, a twen­ty-four year-old aspir­ing geol­o­gist named Charles Lyell knocked on Man­tel­l’s door. Lyell was drawn to Lewes by Man­tel­l’s estab­lished rep­u­ta­tion as a fos­silist. The two men sat talk­ing until the ear­ly morn­ing hours, and a last­ing friend­ship was estab­lished. They became firm allies in the sub­se­quent bat­tle to wrest geo­log­i­cal time from the bib­li­cal lit­er­al­ists. Lyell was to become the pre­mier geol­o­gist of his time, the author of Prin­ci­ples of Geology.

A print used as the fron­tispiece of Man­tel­l’s Illus­tra­tions of the Geol­o­gy of Sus­sex (1827) depicts a vis­it made by Man­tell, Lyell, and William Buck­land, the first pro­fes­sor of geol­o­gy at Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty and a bib­li­cal lit­er­al­ist, to the quar­ry at Cuck­field, a vil­lage 10 miles north­west of Lewes which had yield­ed up Man­tel­l’s dinosaur bones.

It is a rainy after­noon in March, 1825. The three geol­o­gists are in top hats and gen­tle­man­ly garb. They are accom­pa­nied by half-a-dozen less for­mal­ly attired quar­ry work­men. Man­tell is pre­sum­ably the per­son at right, stand­ing behind a ver­ti­cal slab of sand­stone etched with a fos­sil fern. Lyell or Buck­land wields a ham­mer to release a rep­til­ian bone from the rock. In the back­ground is the spire of Cuck­field Church (the quar­ry has since been filled in and a crick­et field stands in its place).

The pic­ture lends itself to metaphor­i­cal inter­pre­ta­tion. What­ev­er the the­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ences between Lyell and Man­tell, on the one hand, and Buck­land, on the oth­er, it is clear that the sto­ry of the past will ulti­mate­ly depend upon the evi­dence of the fos­sil­if­er­ous stra­ta and not upon the author­i­ty and tra­di­tion rep­re­sent­ed by the dis­tant church spire. I par­tic­u­lar­ly like the con­junc­tion at the right of fos­sil ferns and liv­ing plants, reflect­ing each oth­er mir­ror­like across eons of geo­log­ic time. The present is the key to the past, believed Man­tell and Lyell, fol­low­ing the Scots geol­o­gist James Hut­ton; if we want to under­stand the his­to­ry of the Earth and its denizens, let us look to nat­ur­al forces at work on the globe today and apply them to the past.

Man­tel­l’s jour­nal entry for May 21, 1831, recounts the expe­di­tion he made with Lyell to anoth­er near­by quar­ry at Hor­sham, where the two fos­silists hap­pi­ly exam­ined slabs of ancient sand­stone cov­ered with rip­ple marks. Man­tell described these sand­stone sur­faces in a note to the Edin­burgh New Philo­soph­i­cal Jour­nal. No one who has observed the action of waves on a liv­ing beach can doubt that the iden­ti­cal undu­la­tions in ancient sand­stones were made by the same agency, asserts Man­tell. Then he pens a line that is as rel­e­vant today as in his own time: “Obvi­ous as the cause of this curi­ous appear­ance seems to be, yet it has been a sub­ject of dis­pute among men of sci­ence, the mind being but too apt to seek for a mys­te­ri­ous agent, to explain effects which have been, and are still being, pro­duced by some sim­ple oper­a­tion of nature.”

What that “mys­te­ri­ous agent” might be has var­ied from time to time and place to place, but almost invari­ably is has tak­en the form of a human­like intel­li­gence, or ani­mal cre­ator with human qual­i­ties. The psy­chol­o­gist Jean Piaget has shown us that young chil­dren invari­ably evoke arti­fi­cial­ist expla­na­tions of nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­na, so that even Sun, Moon, wind, and clouds become the prod­ucts of a con­scious agency who has act­ed with par­tic­u­lar ref­er­ence to the child. Like­wise, anthro­pol­o­gists see arti­fi­cial­ist expla­na­tions at work with­in so-called “prim­i­tive” cul­tures around the globe. Mid­dle-east­ern cre­ation myths, such as that recount­ed in Gen­e­sis, are among com­mon exam­ples of the arti­fi­cial­ist tra­di­tion. The ten­den­cy to under­stand nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­na in a way that evokes a human­like agency is very strong indeed. The present brouha­ha in the Unit­ed States over Intel­li­gent Design is just the lat­est of arti­fi­cial­ist explanations.

When Hut­ton, Lyell, and Man­tell sug­gest­ed that the present is the key to the past, they were propos­ing a kind of expla­na­tion that was des­tined to trans­form the world in ways they could hard­ly have imag­ined. It might even be said that they turned the world upside down; pre­vi­ous explana­to­ry sys­tems assumed that the past — enshrined in author­i­ty, scrip­tures or tra­di­tion — is key to the present. Root­ing around in the quar­ries in Sus­sex, Man­tell, and Lyell turned expla­na­tion topsy-turvy.

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