The mind being but too apt…

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.