(3089/898) Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle

610) Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is, I dunno. If the Eiffel Tower were now representing the world's age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle-knob at its summit would represent man's share of that age; and anybody would perceive that the skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would, I dunno.

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
"Was the World Made for Man?" (1903)
quoted by Stephen Jay Gould in
Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (1987)

611) An abstract, intellectual understanding of deep time comes easily enough - I know how many zeros to place after the 10 when I mean billions. Getting it into the gut is another matter. Deep time is so alien that we can really only comprehend it as metaphor. And so we do in our pedagogy. We tout the geological mile (with human history occupying the last few inches); or the cosmic calendar (with Homo sapiens appearing for but a few moments before Auld Lang Syne). [...] John McPhee has provided the most striking metaphor of all (in Basin and Range): Consider the earth's history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the King's nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history.

Stephen Jay Gould
Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (1987)
citing John McPhee
Basin and Range (1980)

612) Aristotle insisted that phenomena have at least four distinct kinds of causes - material for their substance, efficient for the pusher or builder, formal for the blueprint, and final for the purpose. A house, in the ancient parable, finds its material cause in stones and bricks, efficient in masons and carpenters, formal in architectural sketches (which "make" nothing in any direct sense, but are surely a sine qua non of any particular design), and final in human desire, for the house would not be built unless someone wanted to live in it. We have, today, pretty much restricted our definition of cause to the pushers and shovers of efficient causation, We would still allow that houses can't be built without substances and plans, but we no longer refer to these material and formal aspects as causes. We have, however, explicitly abandoned the idea of final cause for inanimate objects - and this rejection ranks as, perhaps, the major change in scientific methodology between [the late eighteenth century] and our ours.

Stephen Jay Gould
Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (1987)
citing Aristotle

613) [James Hutton, founder of modern geology] did not grasp the power, worth and distinction of history. He followed a model of science that exalted simple systems, subject to experiment and prediction, over narrative and its irreducible uniqueness. In doing so, he followed a tradition of ordering the sciences by status - from the hard and more "experimental" (physics and chemistry) to the soft and more "descriptive" (natural history and systematics). Geology resides in the middle of this false continuum, and has often tried to win prestige by aping the procedures of sciences with higher status, and ignoring its own distinctive data of history. This problem, born of low self-esteem, continues to this day. Hutton pursued a chimerical view of rigor by deference to Newton, and hoped to assimilate time to Newton's models for space. Today, this deference may be expressed in a fetish for quantification that leads psychologists to conceive intelligence as a single, measurable thing in the head, or biologists to classify organisms by computer without judging the different historical value of characters (the marsupial pouch as more informative than body length).

Stephen Jay Gould
Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (1987)

614) As we have our von Danikens, our _scientific_ creationists, and our faith healers, science in [Charles] Lyell's day [c.1830] also felt besieged by a periphery of charlatans and reactionaries, who often commanded much public support.

Stephen Jay Gould
Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (1987)

615) The intellectual world is littered with systems that pushed consistency to the ends of the earth and the bounds of rationality, but then stepped aside and made an exception for human uniqueness.

Stephen Jay Gould
Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (1987)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 702 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.