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Uniformitarianism: Charles Lyell (3 of 3)

Lyell crafted a powerful lens for viewing the history of the Earth. On Darwin’s voyage aboard the Beagle, for example, he was able to decipher the history of the Canary Islands (right) by applying Lyell’s ideas to the volcanic rock he encountered there. Today satellite measurements reveal that mountains may rise an inch a year, while radioactive clocks help show how they’ve been rising that way for millions of years. But Lyell could never have grasped the mechanism—plate tectonics—that makes this kind of geological change happen.

Yet geologists today also know that some of the factors that changed the Earth in the past cannot be seen at work today. For example, the early Earth was pummeled by gigantic hunks of solar debris, some as big as Mars. For the first one or two billion years of Earth’s history, plate tectonics didn’t even exist as we know it today.

Lyell had an equally profound effect on our understanding of life’s history. He influenced Darwin so deeply that Darwin envisioned evolution as a sort of biological uniformitarianism. Evolution took place from one generation to the next before our very eyes, he argued, but it worked too slowly for us to perceive.

• Tenerife, Canary Islands image courtesy of Roberto Bertero.

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