Eui Yun
Professor Laurie
Anthropology 101
15 April 2011
Charles Lyell
Charles Lyell was a geologist who believed in uniformitarianism which deals with geological and biological forces were acted same over and over again with same force throughout the Earth’s past and present that caused to have the landscape we have today on Earth. According to Allaboutscience Organization, Lyell's work formed the foundation of belief in a universe billions of years old. Lyell was a geologist that enabled him to see how old the rocks were and came with a conclusion of Earth is old. Charles Lyell’s concept “deep time” was one of the most significant contributions to the discovery of evolutionary principles.
Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin were good friends who believed their theories together. Charles Darwin, who thought of evolutionary theory, did not have any proof until Charles Lyell came up with “deep time” concept which made Darwin’s theory logical. Charles Lyell, knowing, the Earth was very old, demonstrated that forces of natural disasters and weathers that have changed the geological landscape until now, but is till consistently changing now. In other words, lots of species and living organisms were changing throughout the time.
I believe if it wasn’t for Charles Lyell supporting Darwin’s theory, the evolutionary theory could have been another imagination to many people. Because Charles Lyell had a proof of changing of landscape of Earth, it made it possible of living organisms changing through over time to adapt to their environment. This supported Darwin’s theory a lot.
The church’s attitude toward Darwin’s theory was negative due to the fact that his theory was going opposite direction from bibles. Church’s idea was humans were fixed body from before and Darwin’s idea was that humans were evolved from other species. After Darwin completed his work and published “On the Origin of Species”, public opinion was negative but the book was scholarly praised and the support of Darwin’s theory gradually increased.
Yun,
ReplyDeleteI was so happy to see that someone decided to write about Lyell. Darwin's theory depended upon time and the age of the Earth was a stumbling block for him. It was commonly thought that the age of the planet was somewhere between 20-100 million years old based on the calculations of Kelvin, who was a well respected scientist of the day. Lyell was able to confirm Darwin's theory by providing the necessary time frame for evolution!
I was also happy to see that some one else posted about Charles Lyell because I did as well. However, I seemed to have missed his concept about time and I am so glad that you posted about it so that everyone can learn more about how influential he was! I also did not realize that it was very possible that Darwin's book became so popular because Lyell supported it so much. He was well respected and I think that Darwin may have been ignored if it wasn't for Charles Lyell.
ReplyDeleteExcellent! That was a very good description of the influence of Lyell on Darwin's work, namely that he gave Darwin the time he needed for natural selection to work. The Church argued that the earth was only about 6000 years old, which made evolution of organisms by natural processes impossible. Lyell orinally only argued for an age of millions of years (instead of billions) but even that was sufficient to make evolution feasible.
ReplyDeleteLanie, thank you for the comment on Kelvin's concept of the earth's age. Its good to remember that the young age of the earth proposed by the church wasn't the only influence during that time in science's history.
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