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Microsoft Word - Criteria for Grading_ArticleSummaries.docx Criteria for Grading Article Summaries (Graded out of 10) Sufficient length of at least 1 single-spaced page: 1 pt. Demonstrating that you thoroughly read and understood the article: 3 pts. Answering each of the questions posed in the assignment in detail: 4 pts. Organization, grammar, and sentence structure: 2 pts. TSRTheSedimentary Record SEPM | Society for Sedimentary Geology Editorial The revolutionary impact of the Deep Time concept: Geology’s modernity and societal implications Andrea Fildani1,∗ 1The Deep Time Institute, 13809 Research Boulevard, Suite 500 94952, Austin, Texas 78750, USA The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking. –Albert Einstein I propose throughout this short op-ed that Geology, asone of the most recently established core sciences, is the one most at risk of societal misinterpretation precisely because of its innovativeness. The discovery of ‘deep time’ and the revelation of temporal change were triggered by the advance of geological methodology, which pushed the boundary of the scientific establishment of the time (Rossi, 1979). These discoveries had profound societal implica- tions that are deeply embedded into the scientific progress of the last few centuries but we, at times even geologists ourselves, still struggle to fully embrace the historical as- pect of geology, instead accepting it as a ‘derivative’ of the physical sciences (Dodick and Orion, 2003). By the end of this op-ed I will reason that geology expands on the physi- cal sciences and should be involved at all decision-making levels, and that geologic literacy should become a top pri- ority in terms of public education and policy making. The core natural sciences: physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology and geology are at different stages of development and societal acceptance, based on time (how long they have been practiced), tangibility (how measurable their questions are), and palatability (how comfortably their con- cepts fit social norms and trends). The establishment of a scientific field demands codes and definitions, a consen- sus from a scientific community that shares methods and manuals (Rossi, 1979). These manuals, the foundation for the science, are constantly revised and rewritten, and their existence is essential, in that they constitute and build the science itself. Copyright © 2022 by the SEPM Society for Sedimentary Geologydoi: 10.2110/sedred.2022.1.1 ∗Corresponding author:
[email protected] However, the consensus and convergent thinking needed for a science to grow are not always present: they are built hardily and slowly with time. In his work, philoso- pher of science Paolo Rossi (Rossi, 1979) noticed that the consensus for mathematics and astronomy has been estab- lished for a very long time, as these disciplines trace back to early human civilizations (and consequently blend the scientific consensus with religious protocols). Even though geological concepts have peppered human writings since ancient times (i.e., Democritus, Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger, and Lucretius are offered as very few examples) and Medieval into Renaissance times (Shen Kuo, Restoro d’Arezzo, and eventually Leonardo da Vinci to mention a few relevant contributors), it was not until the late 17th century and early 18th century that the formative manuals and the scientific consensus for geology really started to shape up. As a science, geology is a late bloomer. Its tardiness to the scene reflects the seriousness of the intellectual barriers that geology had to overcome. Geology is conceptually one of the most modern and revolutionary sciences; revolutionary in the strict sense that it caused a complete and dramatic change in our way of thinking. Physics and natural philosophy claimed to deal with the world as it is (in the Newtonian sense, as it was put in movement by God), and so there was no impetus to pose questions about the formation of the world and the be- ginning of time to such sciences. Geological thinking, on the other hand, gave us tools to understand nature and to reduce risk, but this also added a vulnerability to human existence that required major psychological adjustments for society. Perhaps because of its revolutionary aspect, the consensus for geology has been harder to establish. Indeed, revolutions are unsettling; early geological discourse was shaped by fear. How would institutions and the general public react to the concepts of geology? But what was it about geology that was so unsettling? TSR, Vol. 20, No. 1, p. 1–4, January 2022 1 mailto:
[email protected] THE GIFT OF ’DEEP TIME’ THINKING: A PROMETHEAN TASK The introduction of the concept of Deep Time caused a profound transformation in the way we think. This shift required centuries to pass before it could be fully achieved, with the key period being between the late 1600s and late 1700s (Rossi, 1979). In our modern days we fully under- stand that the history of the universe, the history of Earth, and the history of the human species were built at com- pletely different chronological scales. However, that was not always the case. Natural history and human history were conceived as parallel for a long time, commingled with pre-Christian and then biblical time scales; an Earth not populated by humans was unimaginable and would have been unacceptable if proposed. Early attempts and proposals to detangle human history from natural history and to extend the natural timeframe were rejected as mate- rialistic (e.g., Democritus and Lucretius). Our modern idea of time, which frames today’s scien- tific knowledge, commenced its maturation toward our current understanding around the second half of the 1600s (Rossi, 1979). In the Western world, there was no reason to challenge pre-Christian stories or biblical teachings. Most people did not question the concept that Earth was created specifically for humans by an act of God (or gods)—they were either too scared to doubt a deity’s work or perhaps just so comfortable with the idea that there was no need for change. With bewildering precision, at least for the modern reader’s eyes, the Archbishop James Ussher (1581–1656) appointed Sunday, the 23rd of October, 4004 BC as the day when it all started. It is important to note that Ussher was a scholar and practitioner of the historical research known as chronology, which attempted to reconstruct world history by combining biblical and secular texts (Rudwick, 2014). Ussher, as many chronologists of his time, believed that world history had finite limits in the past and the future, with an overall length of exactly six millennia. According to his calculations the end of the world should have been precisely in 1996! So, the women and men of the second half of the 1600s understood Earth’s history to be about 6000 years long and with a relatively near end. However, a century later, the women and men of the times knew that Earth was millions of years old with no end in sight. The leap took a formidable amount of communal effort. Evidence challenging the comfortable setting offered by the Bible and scholarly establishment came from the “shells and fish” (the ones that eventually would be called fossils) that would occasionally be found on mountain trails; these findings triggered curiosity and long debates. Although initially dismissed as meal scraps, some scholars would claim those shells were evidence of the biblical deluge, while others would appeal to philosophical theories (Aris- totelian and neo-Platonic) in which fossils were ‘organisms’ that could form by “spontaneous generation” from non- living material (Rossi, 1979). According to such theories, this happened inside the Earth. While the collection and reporting of more complete and intriguing fossils continued, acute observers noticed how these contrasted living species and started to realize that some species were not living anymore, that they had gone extinct. To acknowledge the possibility of extinction was equivalent to recognizing elements of imperfection and incompleteness in God’s work. The idea that nature has a history and that the shells document an extinct past started to form in intellectual circles, where nature was not as fixed and immutable as previously believed. Two figures (savants) gave fundamental contributions to the lively fossils debate of the late 17th century: Nicolas Steno (1638-1686) and Robert Hooke (1635-1703). Steno introduced rigorous criteria to read the sedimentary rocks and recognized that fossils were an important component of these strata, contributing to newer ways to interpret the stratigraphic record. In the anatomical descriptions of the head of a shark washed upon the shores of Tuscany (Fig. 1), Steno recognized the similarities between the teeth and the well-known fossils called Glossopetrae (Steno, 1667). These tongue-shaped objects were petrified and found embedded in rocks. He argued that the Glossopetrae were teeth of much larger sharks from earlier periods in history. At the same time, Hooke firmly distanced himself from the biblical deluge and its followers who tied the presence of fossils to such an event (Steno was still in this camp). Hooke thought this hypothesis was improbable and not supported by evidence. In A Discourse of Earthquakes Hooke disputed the biblical view of Earth’s age, proposed the extinction of species, and argued that fossils atop hills and mountains had become elevated by geological processes—quite an unsettling view for his times. Figure 1 Steno’s illustration of a shark’s head and its teeth, which appeared in a report published in 1667. 2 Fildani As intellectuals and philosophers (they called them- selves “savants”) continued to challenge the reassuring Biblical view, it was in mainland Europe where debates were most vibrant. One of the intellectual catalysts of these times was Georges-Louis Leclerc, later known as Comte de Buffon (1706–1788). During Buffon’s lifetime the idea of a ‘deeper time’ and an older Earth and cosmos had al- ready been diffused throughout intellectual circles. Buffon himself was involved in attempts to calculate a reasonable age for the Earth. He adopted the chronologic tables by Jaques Roger (eventually published in 1778) and timed the cooling of spherical objects of different sizes and material to be scaled up to Earth-size. After many hesitations he settled on a conservative age of 75,000 years, released via a comprehensive thirty-six tome Histoire Naturelle. Hav- ing second thoughts, he recalculated the age of Earth to be about three million years, but the new figure was not communicated to the public because he worried about the reader’s response. He was convinced that Le Sombre Abîme du Temps (the Abyss of Time) would put the reader in a state of dismay (Rossi, 1979). The debate over Earth’s genesis summarized by Buffon, who largely drew on and benefitted from the work of Descartes, Diderot, Thomas Wright, and d’Holbac, was already elevated by Emmanuel Kant in his 1755 Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmles where he finally removed the old view of a fixed cosmos and situated humans in their new position: infinite space in front and deep time behind. James Hutton (1726—1797), considered the “father of modern geology” in the Anglophile tradition, was ex- tremely influential