Lecture 1: The age of the Earth & fossil record 1500-1830 (Part 1)
Evolution:
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Change in biology, change of living things overtime
(Image of ape transforming to human is NOT evolution!)
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Evolution is not a law of nature/ force of nature like gravity
Creation stories of the world
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Thousands of different tribes, ethnic groups, people around the world had different creation
stories that explains the world they live in
Ancient Egyptians (c. 2700 BCE)
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Gods created the world out of a lifeless sea of chaos
Believed that after death, a person’s soul faced judgment. If heart weighs more than a
feather, person would be sent to a place of punishment
Norse / Viking
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World was created by gods from body of a dead giant (c. 500 BCE)
Batak of Sumatra
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Sky goddess came down to the sea and a handful of earth/soil was dropped down to give a
place to live on (Sumatra)
Trapped in a metal box underneath the island was a dragon that sometimes rolls around in
its box, explaining why the island was frequently torn with earthquakes
Australian aborigines
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First humans were regurgitated by a great rainbow serpent in the sky
Mayans of Central America
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The creator gods made humans out of maize/corn (maize was their main food) (they thought
you are what you eat xDDD)
Inuits/Eskimos
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Aurora borealis / northern lights are the dancing souls of their ancestors in the sky
Animal creation stories
Goose barnacles
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Barnacle goose
Barnacle goose do not nest in Europe, no one ever seen a barnacle goose nest/egg/chick,
just appeared out of nowhere
Thought barnacle goose grew out of the sea creatures
Thought eagle dives into the sea dies and comes out of the water reborn
During Middle Ages, thought hedgehogs walked into strawberry patch, rolled around on
strawberries to stick on their spines, and went back to their burrow to eat their strawberries
Mandrake root (looks like human) that’s why they have spines
Legend has it that if you pull it out and hear it screaming you will die
Solution: tie rope around dog and around the root, stuff ears with wax/cotton, kick the dog
and it will pull out the root without killing you
Creation stories of ancient Hebrews (c. 540-330 BCE)
God up in heaven, Garden of Eden on earth, stars and planets around earth, outside that is a body of
water, explaining why sky is blue
James Ussher (1650s)
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Archbishop in Ireland
Wanted to estimate the age of the Earth using the Bible and other ancient documents
Many textbooks and websites mention him as if he was an idiot
Prof: “We shouldn’t judge them based on standards of our own times, no one in the past will
live up to our standards and values. The past is a different world, people thought very
differently from us.”
Came out with an estimation of Earth being 6000 years old (created in 4004BC)
His idea became popular, many Christians in Europe thought this is what the Bible said, but
this estimate made its way into the Bible
19th century Bible (1800s)
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Annotation from Bible shows 4004BC
Things not mentioned in creation stories – like fossils
Ancient Greeks and Romans
Hesione vase (c. 550 BC)
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Shooting arrows at monster, monster looks like skull of extinct elephant. They think the large
bones and remains are that of giants and monsters from their mythology
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Skull of elephant with a cavity infront
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In Yorkshire, an abbey was founded by Saint Hilda.
Full of ammonites / snake stones
Local legend was that when St Hilda founded the place, she found that it was full of snakes.
She took her staff, struck the ground and all the snakes miraculously turned to stones.
Carved by local craftsmen to make ammonites look more like snake
Nicolas Steno (1667)
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Danish Bishop
When he was in Italy, a giant shark was caught by local fisherman, and he investigated it
Every tiny detail of shark’s teeth were same as tongue stones, he argued that why tongue
stones look just like shark teeth is because THEY ARE shark teeth, which had turned to stone
But how did they get in the rocks?
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Sharks live in water
When they die their teeth fall into the mud
Large parts of seas and lakes where sediments were gradually washed off from shore due to
rain and falls down as silt or mud, building up layers based on the law of original
horizontality and law of superposition
Many ports and harbour of ancient Greeks and Romans are gone, they are completely filled
up with silt
Leonardo da Vinci
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Noticed that fossils are not randomly scattered as if by a great flood
But rather they were grouped together, like with like, as if they were from the same habitat
Invention of the Microscope (1600s)
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Suddenly able to see little things that were previously too small to be seen with naked eye
Robert Hooke published Micrographia in 1665
People were filthy in the past, everyone had fleas on them all the time
People were shocked when Hooke published the image
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Fossils originally meant “dug up thing”, did not have connection to a previously living thing
(that was a later idea)
Fossils could be a crystal, or an interestingly shaped rock
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He had a piece of fossilised wood, and saw little chambers
He then looked at different types of living woods, and found one that has little chambers
with exact same shape and orientation. Realised he had somehow found a piece of wood
that turned into stone (fossil).
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He gave the little chambers in living things a name, “Cells”.
Originated from monks living in monasteries, their living spaces were like a prison. Monk’s
bedroom in a monastery is called a “Cell”. We also use that word today for a prison cell, with
small identical bedrooms.
John Ray (1627-1705)
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English naturalist
Published a book “The Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691)”
(means the wisdom of God seen through nature)
Tried to catalogue the all species of animals and found out there were thousands of species
Speculated that the way animals were expertly adapted to their way of life prove that they
have been designed by God
Believed that the number of species in nature is fixed and limited since the beginning,
meaning no new species have been created
Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778)
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Swedish naturalist
Became a cataloguer/ taxonomist
By this time, there were >2x the number of mammals known from Ray’s time
Species are clear cut and distinct
The only source for a living thing is from parents of the same species
i.e. living things don’t spontaneously spring into life from nothing, it was a common
widespread belief back then (Spontaneous generation: eg. Dropped meat on the ground and
came back discovering it’s full of maggots eating it, people would say the maggots just
appeared in the meat)
Linnaeus was against the spontaneous generation theory
There were far too many species in the world to fit in Noah’s ark (seemed like an irreligious
thing to say when he was a devout Christian)
è Christians back in the day were not devoted to a literal reading of the stories in the
Bible! People today are surprised how could these religious men say stories from the
Bible aren’t true, but the fact is that they did. (Prof: try to think just like the person you
are who lives today, but also try to grasp the fact that ppl in different times lived
differently. Just like ppl in diff places think differently, with diff traditions and beliefs.
Linnaeus introduced a binomial nomenclature, two Latin names: genus and species
Eg. Homo sapiens (Linnaeus named us that!) Homo = man, sapiens = thinking
Before him, naturalists would give long paragraph descriptions of species as their official
name
Genus is the group, species is the specific name.
4400 species of animals and 7700 species of plants
For him, the fact that all plants and animals were classifiable according to the system proved
that there was divine design
i.e. God must have designed the natural world
Declared that there is no extinction
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Paradoxa – crazy creatures such as mermaids, unicorns
è Back in the days there were many reports that travellers seen mermaids but it couldn’t
be proven. He made this category in case they turned out to be true.
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Hierarchical system of classification
What is a species?
Javan myna (Acridotheres javanicus), a common species of bird in SG
Common Myna
Common Hill Myna
Georges Buffon (1707-1788)
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Frenchman
Also wanted to find out the age of the Earth, but using an experimental way unlike James
Ussher who used books
Speculated that Earth started as a glowing molten sphere that gradually cooled
He had an iron foundry, and made iron spheres of diff sizes, heated them up and measured
rates which they cooled
The Epochs of Nature / Les Époques de la nature (1778)
Estimated Earth as 75,000 years old
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Observed that species in different parts of the world (like America vs. Europe) are so
different that they must have been created separately there
Speculated that species can change a little to fit their environments, but not into other
species. (Europeans have been settling in different parts of the world, taking their livestock
with them. Recognised that the livestock were a little different from the ones back home)
Modern mining became quite sophisticated by this time, the deeper you drill down into the
Earth, the hotter it gets
Miners started realising the rocks were going down in Earth at an angle
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From the diagram, digging straight down, we encounter a dark coloured rock followed by a
light coloured one, and back to dark coloured again at the deepest point
Dawn of the study of Geology
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James Hutton (1726-1797)
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Scottish geologist
Hutton’s Theory of the Earth (1795)
Cliff made out of sedimentary rocks (going back to Nicolas Steno), rock layers build up
horizontally
But he found out that the layers who used to be horizontal were now vertical
He pointed out that each layer would take thousands of years to form, and there are so
many of them + the time taken for them to become vertical + time taken for them to moved
up into the air to be eroded and move back down again
He said what we see here is the evidence from the Earth itself of an age that is
unimaginable by the mind of Man
Believed that Earth was essentially infinite, that it was so unbelievably ancient that it
basically existed forever
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BUT, if dry land is always being washed away into the sea (erosion), eventually there
wouldn’t be land left on Earth
Hutton thought that God wouldn’t allow simply Earth to be washed away, so he theorised
that if forces of erosion wash Earth away, there must be forces that counteract and create
new Earth, maintaining a balance (Eg. Earthquakes and volcanoes), forming a
circular/cyclical system that goes on forever
(Prof: impt lesson to takeaway is that these early geologists were all religious men, many of them
were clergy/ priest. They were the same ppl that discovered that Earth was not thousands of years
old. Contradicting a literal reading from the Bible wasn’t that crucial in those days, it wasn’t a deal
breaker for most ppl. Ppl could accommodate these scientific ideas with their existing religion)
William Smith (1769-1839)
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Worked for companies digging canals, before invention of railways
Companies started digging industrial network of canals
Expert surveys had to be done when digging due to uneven landscape while the canal had to
be levelled
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He found out that the same fossils were always found in the same layer (strata) of rocks
The order of the beds of rocks is the same everywhere those rocks are found
Lower layer of rock is older, and the one above it is newer. With lots of layers, we get to
know the history of that part of the world
Means that fossils of lower beds are older than the ones above it.
è Became possible to reconstruct the history of life based on actual remains rather than
traditional stories
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First geological map in the world (1815)