Almighty Gould

Roy Porter

• Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time by Stephen Jay Gould
  Harvard, 219 pp, £15.50, May 1987, ISBN 0 674 89198 8

Years ago Sir John Plumb declared: ‘The past is dead.’ He didn’t add: ‘long live history.’ But try as historians will to put the past behind them, others are always resurrecting it and abusing it for their own purposes. Take the mindless mouthings of ‘Victorian values’, the ‘good’ (or the ‘bad’) old days, the Dunkirk spirit, the ghost of Ramsay MacDonald – in all such sloganising, the ghosts of the past are conjured up to clinch arguments about the present. And in no field, paradoxically, is this ancestral magic so pervasive as in science – above all, in myth-making introductions to scientific textbooks. There the ritual incantation of deities and devils – with Galileo, Newton, Darwin worshipped on the one side, and Descartes, Lamarck, Lysenko anathematised on the other – provides exemplars to imitate and moral lessons to avoid. Each science, of course, boasts its own dramatis personae for the performance of these hagiographical and exorcistic rituals. Amongst geologists, the villain-in-chief, endlessly execrated, is the Rev. Thomas Burnet. Leading the heroes home are James Hutton and Sir Charles Lyell.