Darwin & Evolution
o Important figure in history of science
Lecture 1: The age of the Earth & fossil record 1500-1830. Part 1
This lecture – Background before Darwin
People always have stories about how life/world began. Every culture and
people have different stories.
Important: Before Darwin, everyone does not have the same idea.
 James Ussher 1654
o Counted the generations of the bible
o Come out with a date when creation occur – 4004 BC
 Many people make fun of this
 There are some who still hold on to this date
o But this was debated. John Lightfoot of Cambridge
proclaimed that the time of creation was on 23
October, 4004 B.C. at 9:00 in the morning!
 There are loads of things that are not mentioned in the creation
stories. What about them?
o E.g. Fossil, Devil’s toenail, Snake stones, Tongue stones
 Stenos 1667
o Danish Bishop
o Found a gigantic shark, washed up in Italy
o Dissected
o Compared the teeth of this shark with these tongue
stones. Identical in every possible detail
o These tongue stones are shark’s teeth that have turned
into a stone
o How do part of animal can be embedded in solid rock?
o Got him thinking of how rocks are formed
 Sediments flow out from rivers into the sea.
Imagine what happen year after year…
 Builds up into layers
 This is what Stenos think made rocks
 Creatures that live on the sea that died, their
parts would fall into the sediments and
buried
 Tooth of the shark that shaped the stones
and not the other way around
 The thing that was fossilized was harder
than the thing (mud) around it
o Stenos 3 Principles
 Law of original horizontality
 Layers/strata of the rocks were
originally horizontal
 Law of superposition
 Therefore all the layers, must be
underneath and newer layers
above
 Law of Lateral Continuity (Horizontal strata
extend laterally until they thin to nothing at
the edge of their basin of deposition)
 John Ray 1627-1705
o English naturalist
o There were thousands of species by this early dates
o He argued that the fact livings things are adapted / fit
the world, evidence that they were designed by God.
o ‘the number of true species in nature is fixed and
limited and, as we may reasonably believe, constant
and unchangeable from the first creation to the present
day.’
o I.e. though loads of species, there were only a set of
them that were created by God and has not changed
since then
 Invention of microscope around this time
o See things previously invisible to human eyes
o Person who popularize microscope – Robert Hooke
(1665)
o A flea was the most common thing to everyone but it’s
small that anyone notice
o Hooke invented the term ‘cell’
 Carl Linnaeus 1707-1778
o He decided to try catalogue all the living things in the
world
o More than twice the number of animals known from
Ray’s time
o He found that species are clear cut. Its this one and that
one. Only come from previous parents.
o But where do each one come from? No new species
ever arrived or appear.
o Way too many for Noah’s ark. So the story must be
metaphorical
o All these people are religious man. None of them are
atheist. But people who are interested in nature.
o He categorize animal kingdom into various groups
 He was convinced the fact that you can
classify things, evidence of divine design.
 The world is perfect. None have gone
extinct. Extinction is believed to be
impossible
 classified according to the degree of similarities. He used a
binomial nomenclature two Latin names -- genus and species.
 -4,400 species of animals and 7,700 species of plants. classification
proved design
 -at one time declared 'of all the species originally formed by the
Deity, not one is destroyed'.
 How do you classify species?
o Mammals, birds, reptiles etc…
o These groupings can form nesting taxonomy
 Each group have loads of subgroups
o All these worked on centuries before Darwin.
 Georges Buffon 1707-1788
o Wrote an important book
o Estimated the age of the earth very differently Ussher
o Les époques de la nature (1778)
o Estimated the age of the Earth as 75,000 years old.
o Species in different parts of the world are so different
they must have been created there…
o Speculated that species change to fit environment. –
but not into other species.
o He did experiments
o He thinks the earth originally is molten larva
o Completely hot and cooling down
o How long ago was that? To be of the temperature now
o Estimated the age of the Earth as 75,000 years old.
o Other people start to investigate the earth by
examining the substance of the planet
 Sir William Hamilton, Britain's envoy to the Spanish court at
Naples.
o The eruption of 1760-1.
"The object of this plate is to show, that those who
have asserted that the seat of the fire is always towards
the summit, or not lower than the middle of the
volcano, have been very ill informed"
o Volcanoes made rock and change the shape of the
earth
o Hexagonal columns made by large bodies of larva, cool
in a rapid way.
 Mining allow them to create imaginary cross-sections through the
earth (diagonal)
o Vast sheets went at an angle deep down into the earth
o Things that presumably horizontal is moved around
 James Hutton 1726-1797
o Scottish geologist
o Earth is shaped by methods and causes that are still
happening now
o He believed that there is cycle in which new land are
always created.
o He thought the earth is eternal. There is engine within
the earth.
 o One of the many figures who estimate the earth is
unbelievably ancient
o He is more extreme than anybody
o Earth is eternal, existed forever
o His views are not accepted anymore today
o Geological unconformity – how he state his case and
very compelling
 Rocks deposited horizontally
 The bottom layer once horizontal, deposited
for very long time
 After long time, they somehow moved to
become vertical
 Then those layer, somehow uplifted to the
dry land and had been eroded away
 Those layers have gone down again because
new layers have been deposited on top of
them
 Unconformity – not the usual pattern of one
layer on top of another
 This cliff side showed and unbelievable of
the earth. It must take very long time for the
rocks to be deposited.
 Not only long age between strata but they
have undergone so much change over so
many years
o Very new idea of thinking but not an irreligious one
 They have come to accept that the earth is really old
 The usual history that one hear documentary is wrong
o Lectures will challenge these
o E.g. Richard Dawkins said before Darwin, everyone
believed earth is 6000 years old
o Before Darwin appeared, many people have already
come to accept that the earth is not a few thousand
years old
o Traditional few based on textual evidence displaced
o Not a conflict between science and religions
o They are all religious men.
o Reconcile by interpreting the bible not literally