Science now takes for granted the importance of forces and time
spans we can’t perceive directly The Dangers of Extrapolation By
Darwin’s time, 19th-century geologists and paleontologists were
well aware of the fossil record—and they knew that fossils were
old. Naturalists recognized the characteristic appearance and
extinction of faunas in the geologic record; by the mid-1800s,
they had named the periods and even established their order of
succession. But the implications of the fossil record for the
age of the Earth remained controversial. One group of scholars
constructed increasingly elaborate theories of successive
catastrophes that reconciled the fossil record with a young
Earth. Lyell and Darwin belonged to another camp, pioneered by
James Hutton, which argued that the fossil history was evidence
of a far more ancient Earth. As Hutton put it in a 1785 paper
presented to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Earth’s geology
revealed “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.” The
matter was far from s