560 BOOK REVIEWS

TIME’S ARROW, TIME’S CYCLE. By Stephen Jay Gould. Cambridge: Harvard Univer- sity Press. 1987. xiii + 222 pp., figures, bibliography, index. $17.50 (cloth).

Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle’s looks at the discovery of “deep” time - the recognition that the world is almost incomprehensibly old - through two major themes. The first major theme is the scientific and philosophi- cal effect of two Western cultural views of time: that of time as cyclical and that of time as linear. Neither is completely correct from a scientific point of view (many natural pro- cesses produce seasonal and other cyclical recurrences and yet there is plenty of evi- dence of linear, evolutionary change in na- ture as well), nor completely satisfying from a philosophical point of view. (“If moments have no distinction, then they have no inter- est;” thus we need both cycles and arrows to give meaning and interest to our natural phenomena).

The second major theme is a favorite of Gould’s: the nature of the scientific endeavor, which he delights in presenting as not what it appears. In what he calls the “textbook cardboard” view of history, there evolves an accepted view of the history of a field in which good guys and bad guys are judged by how they propel the march of science relentlessly on towards Truth, which is defined as what we believe. Good guys are empirical and evo- lutionary, because we are; bad guy are arm- chair and creationist. But because both cycles and arrows are appropriate views of time, goodness and badness cannot be affixed to temporal philosophy. The development of the idea of deep time is illuminated by an appre- ciation of the role played by these two differ- ent concepts in the scientific and philosophical ideas of Hutton, Lyell, Burnett, Cuvier, and others. The themes of time, and the nature and history of science, are inter- woven throughout the book.

History is not what has been presented to us. We are misled by those who stand be- tween us and the historical event: those who have cut the cardboard. Gould obviously en- joys this sort of historical debunking. Thus Cuvier and the bad guy catastrophists are presented as good guys after all (“fine scien- tists”) who were terrific empiricists and used sound scientific methodology. They just got a bad rap in history because Lyell cardboard-

ized their position. They were actually closer to the “modern truth” because as linear time proponents, their views are more compatible with the modern view of an evolving, chang- ing world. The good guy uniformitarians, on the other hand, weren’t the great empiricists that cardboard has cut them out to be. Hut- ton actually started from a religious premise and built a theory around it. Hutton was a lousy writer, but he was “translated” by his bulldog, Playfair, and through him, received an undeserved reputation for empiricism. Similarly, Lyell wasn’t the great empiricist we give him credit for, either, but he was a smashing writer who convinced posterity mostly by the power of his prose. The role of cyclical time driving Lyell and Hutton, and linear time driving Cuvier, is related to the scientific and religious views of these schol- ars, and is discussed at length.

What you read in textbooks and what your teachers told you is really wrong, Gould ex- pounds. All this is a lot of fun, and there is much history and philosophy to intellec- tually chew on in this book. The problem with the book is that it is neither fish nor fowl: it is not a “real” history of geology, a “real” treatment of the nature of the scien- tific endeavor, nor a “real” autobiographical journey through one person’s growing recog- nition of some important historical themes and their interrelation. It is something that is part each and part other things as well. And it’s a very interesting book, though I don’t know quite where it fits. I wouldn’t be able to use it in anthropology class; a geolo- gist friend told me it was too philosophical for a geology class, and it’s likely to be too scientific for a philosophy of science class. Gould may have intended it for the general public, but it is very different from and much more scholarly than his collections of Natu- ral History columns. Yet it is not indisputa- bly written for his scientific peers (as was his book on ontogeny and phylogeny). It should probably be read by someone with a good scientific background and with wide-ranging interests in science, history, and philosophy. As we have come to expect from Gould, this book is interesting and clear.

EUGENIE C. SCOTT National Center for Science Education Berkeley, California