I wrote an essay on James Hutton when I was challenged to a debate about deep time by someone called Wolfbittengodsmitten. He claimed he could out debate anybody on these boards but left pretty sharpish when I actually tried to engage him.
To save the creationists the bother of having to google him or run him through wikipedia, we know how actually trying to learn anything makes their brains ache, here it is.
It is a potted history of the man and his massive contribution to the founding of the science of geology.
James Hutton and Deep Time
Before the 18th century enlightenment there hadnt been any systematic investigation of the earth and its geology.
Polymaths like Galileo and Descartes had written on the subject but hadnt gone into any great detail, some cosmogonies - all encompassing treatise on the earth had been written; the best being Stenos Dissertation - famous for correctly surmising what a fossil was and for describing for the first time the process of sedimentation - while still sticking to a strict biblical creation.
The vast majority of people of all educational standards would have agreed that the earth appeared before them as it always had done since the beginning of time, and if they were up to date with the work of Ussher the Archbishop of Aramaugh - Annales Veteris Testamenti - they would be aware that the Earth was created on the morning of the 16th October 4004 BC at 9 am.
James Hutton is a man not widely known outside of the geological community and yet he was one the greatest scientific thinkers Great Britain has ever produced. He developed the concept of Deep Time, he discovered the secret of the Earths great age, and to my mind that ranks him along side men of genius like Newton and Darwin.
Hutton was born in 1726 , the year before newtons death, to well off parents of the Edinburgh Mercantile and professional classes, and he would pursue Newtons idea of the universe obeying constant laws to the activities of the earth, and in so doing he would wipe out 1500 years of biblical literalism.
His education was the best available at the time, he trained at Edinburghs medical school where he was considered bright if somewhat aimless pupil. He continued his studies in Paris at its University pursuing anatomy and also becoming interested in chemistry. He was changing from training for medical practice to becoming, what was known in those days as, a natural philosopher. from there he moved on to Leyden in Holland where he completed he medical degree. he had one of the finest educations achievable in 18th century Europe.
He put that education to good use in his early career as a chemist, he used a technique that he and a friend had developed to set up a chemical works in london ( producing sal ammoniac ), this proves that he was a gifted chemist and a canny business man as this made him financially secure.
He returned north to run a family farm in the Scottish Borders in the Blackadder Valley. He studied the latest farming techniques in Norfolk and turned them to his own property with great success. We can assume that it was during this time that he started to take an interest in his land and the geology that underpinned it. This interest lead to him travelling the UK over the rest of his life until there was scarcely an area he hadnt visited and studied.
He spent 13 years farming before deciding, in 1754, to return to live in Edinburgh. He had already started to develop his theories on the Earth by then and was also known as the leading mineralogist in Scotland. His starting point for his theories, his Galapagos finches if you will, was watching the soil of his fields slowly being stripped away by erosion. His first two key points was that his soil was made of a mixture of organic material and the products of erosion of the local sedimentary rocks, and that this erosion of the rocks surface was constant. These ideas were not strictly new, but the way that he had linked erosion and deposition was novel.
He lived during a period of intellectual flourishing that we now call the Scottish Enlightenment, a period of original thought that is quite extraordinary. Great men of this period include: David Hume, the philosopher, Adam Smith, the worlds first economic theorist, James Watt, of steam power fame, and Joseph Black, the chemist, these are the most famous names ( alongside Hutton ) to come from this great flowering of original thought. Edinburgh became known as the Athens of the North. Hutton was a central player in this enlightenment, free from the burden of employment he spelt the rest of his life developing his theories. Towards the end of the 18th century this intellectual flowering had a formal forum for its debates when the Royal Society of Edinburgh was set up. Hutton was a founder member, and he used it to finally bring his theories to a wider circle of his peers, he was challenged to synthesise his ideas into 2 lectures in 1784, and he spent the next few months bring together his lifetimes work. This would be the spark that lead to modern geology, the understanding of the true age of the earth and, to some extent, evolutionary biology.
The majority of natural philosophers of the period thought, if they though about geology at all, that rocks had precipitated from an universal ocean, that was certainly the theory that was taught at Edinburgh University at the time, and it was the Theory expounded by Werner, who was acclaimed as the greatest authority on the systems of the Earth in his day it was widely assumed that these waters were either the waters of creation or the waters of the Noachian flood. But Hutton had already discovered experimentally that rocks contained substances that were insoluble in water. He, along with Joseph Black, also came to the conclusion that heat from within the earth was the only possible mineralising principle ( as he called lithification ), and that this along with great pressure, such as that at the sea floor, could lead to lithification ( he was in fact wrong that lithification needs heat as well as pressure, just pressure can lead to lithification ). This insight along with his previous thoughts on erosion and deposition laid the ground work for modern geology. But his lectures would put him at odds with the establishment of his day.
On the day of the first lecture, March 7th 1785, Hutton was so sick ( with nerves? ) that his friend Joseph Black had to read his prepared notes to the Society, thus giving it his implicit approval. This first line was; Concerning the systems of the Earth, its duration and stability. The lecture outlined Huttons ideas on how the rocks that we walk on today are made up of the waste of previous rocks in a seemingly endless cycle of erosion and deposition. This was well evidenced form Huttons many journey around Great Britain. It was explained how rocks lithified in the oceans, how they were then lifted up to form land and these rocks in turn were eroded into the ocean to be lithified. The end of the lecture discounted precipitation as the means for lithification and in its stead proposed heat and pressure.
The second lecture 4 weeks later was delivered by Hutton. In this he proposed that the rocks being eroded werent raised to land by a drop in water level but were raised from the sea through the action of the earths internal heat. This again was evidenced. If rocks came to be on land through a drop in water level ( as the precipitation theory held ) then all the strata should be more or less horizontal. and they arent. A force was pushing the rocks up, fracturing and folding them too. He had evidence of this heat in the form of mineralised veins in cracks in the rocks. He also saw dykes and sills of volcanic rock pushing up through older strata from deeper levels. There is a famous exposure on Arthurs Seat in Edinburgh, it is a place where igneous sill of Salisbury Crags has pieces of the country rock it was intruded into within it, thus proving that it was forced into older rocks. he also noted that he saw land fossils ( plants etc. ) in marine sediments, thus proving that the sediment had been eroded from land into water,a nd had now been raised up onto land to be eroded once again.
Finally he came to the crucial question of timing. What sort of time scale did he envisage for these events. He urged his listeners to ponder the erosion of rock that they knew from their studies, he surmised that from the perspective of human lifetimes that this prospect had no beginning and no end. He wasnt arguing for an eternal earth, just one unfathomably old.
This was a bombshell. No one in the room, save a few close friends had expected such an earth shattering conclusion. Only one other thinker had ever postulated an earth older than the biblical 6000 years ( Buffon whose theory that the earth had cooled from a molten ball over 75,000 years ) and his theory had lost ground to that of werners precipitation theory within the timeframe of the Bible. here was an idea that challenged mans position at the centre of the cosmos.
