Book Review: The Man Who Found Time

I just finished reading a biography of James Hutton, "The Man Who Found Time." Unless you're a geologist, you probably don't know who James Hutton is (I didn't before I read the book). But his discoveries profoundly changed how we think about the world and our place in it.

This won't really be a traditional book review; I'm not going to summarize the book and I'm not really going to critique it. All I'll say is, I really enjoyed it and it was a great refresher on the Scottish Enlightenment and the amazing ideas that came out of it that continue to shape the way we think.

James Hutton is the man who dared to defy conventional wisdom that the Earth was 6,000 years old. Yes, I know some people still believe that today, but just over 200 years ago everyone believed this, especially some of the most learned scholars in the world. They tried to explain the geology around them by using the flood and assuming that the great catastrophe of the flood and the waters receding back left everything that we see now.

Hutton's major breakthrough was realizing that rocks form all the time. As debris is eroded off of old rocks, it can gather at the bottom of a body of water, and over time enough pressure builds to turn the eroded material into new rock. This rock can then be lifted above the sea level by geological processes, which explains many of the formations he saw around him. The key here is that he realized that the process of erosion would take a very, very long time, meaning that for new rock to be formed, the Earth had to be extremely old. He didn't put a number on it, but he realized it was much more than 6,000 years old.

I think Hutton's discovery and story are incredible for two reasons. The first is that it's something that is relatively obvious in hindsight. Hutton's discovery required no advanced geological background; in fact, geology as a field didn't exist yet. He was a chemist, which certainly helped, but the things he saw could have been identified much earlier. Are there any problems like that today, where something is blatantly obvious once it's figured out, but it takes a veritable genius to crack the code? I think it happens fairly regularly on the scale of small problems, but what about big problems. If anyone knows of something like this let me know :)

The second thing that really struck me about this story was the intense backlash Hutton received for this theory.  The standard church doctrine was that the Earth was 6,000 years old, and no one really wants to go against that. I suppose we see hints of that today with so many people refusing to believe in an Earth that's older than 6,000 years old, but in Hutton's time the backlash came from fellow scientists. I've heard similar stories about this happening in science today, but rarely does it last someone's entire life like it did for Hutton.

Reading this book made me glad that I'm a member of a church that respects science. The church doesn't have an official stance on the age of the Earth or evolution, leaving room for science to do its job. And this makes sense. The church's job is to bring the gospel to people, not force scientific ideas on people. The church (and of course, God) care much more about our spirituality and whether we're keeping our covenants than whether or not we adopt a literal interpretation of the biblical creation story. Learning about science is encouraged, and is something that can help us later in the eternities.

Why do we have four limbs?

One of the greatest things about Astrobiology is how expansive it is - it literally includes everything "in heaven and in the earth, and under the earth; things which have been, things which are, [and] things which must shortly come to pass" (DC 88:79). Today's entry is about the topic of evolution, which is not my main field of study, but is something that falls under the purview of astrobiology.

Today I came across this article from the science news site Science Daily, which by the way, is a site I really like for news from all fields of science. The article is on animal evolution, and specifically about why we have four limbs. It's been known for quite some time that all mammals. birds, reptiles and amphibians are tetrapods, meaning they have four limbs. The limbs could be fins, wings or arms and legs (or even tiny stubs that you'd never notice), but they're all related to each other. But the reason for why all these animals have four lime is still an unsolved problem in biology.

The researchers were studying animals hatchlings and embryos and comparing physiological features. (From Science Daily)

Very early in the development of all the embryos the group looked at, the embryos form into 3 distinct layers, known as germ layers. Each of the three germ layers has a specific purpose - the ectoderm (outside layer) generally forms the skin and nervous system, the endoderm (inside layer) forms the digestive tract and many other essential organs, and the mesoderm (middle layer) generally forms muscle, tissue, bone and other parts of the body.

Very early on in an embryo's development the mesoderm splits into two separate layers. The hypothesis presented in this paper is that pairs of limbs can only form where these mesoderm layers interact with the ectoderm. Between these points, they propose that limbs simply can't form because the gut is developing.

Sorry, no centaurs allowed in this universe apparently.

But I suppose a god may be able to muster a one or two (dozen) extra arms

To be completely honest, reading about this left me with a lot more questions than answers, but parts of it make sense. The gut is really the most important part of any organism. Without the ability to have energy sources come in and be turned into something the body can use, the organism dies. I could imagine that growing an extra leg or two right next to the developing digestive system might interfere with survival. That being said, I'm still not sure why limbs can only form there, or how exactly this process happens.

The spiritual conclusion I came to while reading this is that we really are created in God's image. There's something innate about the way we look that isn't random. It could be that the laws of physics simply don't allow anything else. I don't know though, that's pure speculation. What I do know is that God created this Earth and everything on it with a plan. Call it intelligent design if you'd like, but I know that as we keep learning about how evolution worked that more things like this will be discovered, and we'll see God's hand in the entire process.

The full paper is available for free here. The title is "The lateral mesodermal divide: an epigenetic model of the origin of paired fins," Evolution & Development, 2014 by Laura Nuño de la Rosa, Gerd B. Müller, and Brian D. Metscher from the University of Vienna.