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The weald of Kent: Darwin hesitated to Ussher in a better date

How old is old? This may seem like a superficial question but, when it comes to evolution, what you think you see may rest heavily on what you can’t really see. Evolution is so slow that it has obviously taken a lot of time getting to where it is now. But how much time, and how can we know? If Darwin was right, or even if the Bible was right, then living species had to have arisen at some time or other. That was either when something first wiggled in the primordial soup or when Adam, ever the joker, ribbed Eve. If we’re all made in God’s image, nothing’s changed since we were driven East of Eden or, indeed, since the emergence of the first things that creepeth on the earth. But if, instead, we’ve all come from plain broth, much has happened since. If evolution takes its own good time, that means a lot of time. One of the classical clowns of biology was Irish Archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656, Fig. 1), who made himself (in)famous by his use of Biblical genealogy to estimate the age of the earth. His ‘‘begat’’ calendar pinned New Earth’s Day on Sunday, October 22, 4004 BC (at nightfall). Eve didn’t carve any ‘I love Adam’ graffiti on the Tree of Knowledge (none that have been discovered, at least), but it was generally assumed that the creative force was God. Creation was seen as a series of discrete, instantaneous events. Science properly ridicules literal interpretation of this idea these days. Indeed, it may be hard for us to understand how Ussher could have been taken seriously even in his own time. But that may not be entirely fair. Without substantial evidence to the contrary, dating based on received truth was certainly reasonable in principle. But by the nineteenth century, empirical rather than narrative evidence was rapidly appearing and, perhaps more accurately, was becoming formally recognized as the appropriate basis for understanding the world in the new Age of Science. An important message clearly readable from empirical data was evidence of very slow geological changes that could explain otherwise strange discoveries, such as ocean remains like seashells found buried high in inland mountains. This was prehistoric evidence, so it had to be interpreted in some indirect way. Imagining the challenge this raised makes it understandable that religious explanations need not have been viewed as particularly fanciful. In fact, invoking vast, blind, and impersonal but unknown forces might properly have been viewed as suspect. By the late eighteenth century, geologists had begun systematically studying many aspects of the earth’s surface structures: changes in coastlines, river courses, volcanic island formation, glaciers, and erosion. The leading nineteenth century figure and the icon of this change was Charles Lyell (1797-1875), a good friend of Charles Darwin. Lyell had developed a basically modern scientific geology, approaching diverse types of data with the same empirical, systematic, processrather than a creation-based approach. Among the many interesting examples he used to illustrate his methodology was the evidence that even since Christian times the ground level at the Roman Temple of Juniper Serapis, outside of Naples, had twice changed about 20 feet as the result of earthquakes (Fig. 2). The evidence, which could be historically documented, included a layer of recent soil between former coastal cliffs and the current beach line, as well as marine growth on a band many feet above ground level around some historically dated pillars of the temple. Lyell stressed that this showed the error of the strongly held contemporary view that it was the sea, not the land, that had changed, a view that had led ‘‘the poets of old to select the rock as the emblem of firmness — the sea as the image of inconstancy.’’ As Lyell ends his chapter by quoting a verse by