494 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
version requires revision to the point of near reversal—for the battle lines have
been drawn falsely for two prominent reasons that have largely disappeared from
historical memory.
First, Kelvin's efforts did not inspire fear and ridicule among most natural
historians. The great majority of biologists and geologists welcomed his attempt to
replace a vague feeling about immensity with actual limits. Moreover, most
naturalists regarded Kelvin's figure of 100 million years as quite generous and fully
sufficient to render geological history at any rate suggested by the empirical
record. (Only later, in the 1890's, as Kelvin revised his estimate drastically
downward, did significant numbers of geologists demur, arguing that their record
could not fit into the time now allotted. Darwin's persistent but idiosyncratic
opposition, documented below as the chief claim of this section, has been mistaken
as a general consensus of geologists, thus leading to the main error of the canonical
version.) In fact, many natural scientists breathed a sigh of relief at the amplitude
of Kelvin's early allotments. To cite one particularly astute observer from general
culture, and to illustrate the diffusion of a common impression of sufficiency,
Mark Twain stated in his famous essay, "The damned human race" (largely written
as a satirical response to A. R. Wallace's argument for intrinsic human meaning in
the cosmos, as justified by an early version of the anthropic principle): "According
to these [Kelvin's] figures, it took 99,968,000 years to prepare the world for man,
impatient as the Creator doubtless was to see him and admire him. But a large
enterprise like this has to be conducted warily, painstakingly, logically."
Second, Kelvin declared no general warfare against a hidebound science of
geology; the implications that he drew from his own estimates of the earth's age
contained little to offend most earth scientists. Kelvin did haughtily dismiss one
style of argument carelessly pursued by many geologists, particularly the most
committed of uniformitarians: the treatment of time as so vast that no practical
limit could be placed upon any process—a kind of heuristic eternity, if you will.
Most geologists accepted Kelvin's chastisement on this point, and happily altered
their language because they felt unthreatened by Kelvin's estimate. One hundred
million years seemed quite sufficient to accomplish any observed or inferred
geological work.
Kelvin saw right through the shaky basis of Lyell’s conceptual edifice: the
conflation of substantive and methodological meanings of uniformity. Spatio-
temporal invariance (uniformity) of natural law must be assumed as a basis for
scientific inquiry into the past, but uniformity of state (non-directionalism of
earth's history) cannot be inferred as a consequence, and can, moreover and to the
contrary, be directly refuted by nature's own invariable laws. On this particular
issue, Lyell could not have encountered a tougher opponent than the man who had
formulated the second law of thermodynamics! The very constancy of the second
law, and the attendant vector of time that follows as a result, smashed any hope for
a long-term, steady-state in the earth's physical appearance. In other words,
uniformity of law disproved uniformity