Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time pdf

斯蒂芬杰古尔德是美国古生物学家、进化生物学家和科学史学家。他是他这一代最有影响力和最广泛阅读的科普作家之一。古尔德的大部分职业生涯都在哈佛大学任教，并在纽约的美国自然历史博物馆工作。 1996 年，古尔德被聘为纽约大学的文森特·阿斯特（Vincent Astor）生物学客座研究教授，之后他在纽约大学和哈佛之间分配教学时间。 古尔德对进化生物学最重要的贡献是与 Niles Eldredge 在 1972 年提出的间断平衡理论。该理论提出，大多数进化的特点是长期的进化稳定性，很少被快速的分支物种形成所打断。该理论与种类渐进论形成鲜明对比，后者是一种流行的观点，即进化变化的特征是化石记录中平稳而连续的变化模式。 Gould 的大部分实证研究都是基于蜗牛属 Poecilozonites 和 Cerion。他还为进化发育生物学做出了重要贡献，他的著作《个体发育和系统发育》获得了广泛的专业认可。 [5]在进化论中，他反对严格的选择论、应用于人类的社会生物学和进化心理学。他反对神创论，并建议将科学和宗教视为两个不同的领域（或“不重叠的权威”），其权威不重叠。 古尔德被公众所熟知主要是因为他在《自然历史》杂志上发表了 300 篇受欢迎的文章，以及为专家和非专家撰写的众多书籍。 2000年4月，美国国会图书馆将他命名为“活着的传奇”

Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time pdf 斯蒂芬·杰·古尔德

Rarely has a scholar attained such popular acclaim merely by doing what he does best and enjoys most. But such is Stephen Jay Gould's command of paleontology and evolutionary theory, and his gift for brilliant explication, that he has brought dust and dead bones to life, and developed an immense following for the seeming arcana of this field. In Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle his subject is nothing less than geology's signal contribution to human thought--the discovery of ''deep time,'' the vastness of earth's history, a history so ancient that we can comprehend it only as metaphor. He follows a single thread through three documents that mark the transition in our thinking from thousands to billions of years: Thomas Burnet's four-volume Sacred Theory of the Earth (1680-1690), James Hutton's Theory of the Earth (1795), and Charles Lyell's three-volume Principles of Geology (1830-1833). Gould's major theme is the role of metaphor in the formulation and testing of scientific theories--in this case the insight provided by the oldest traditional dichotomy of Judeo-Christian thought: the directionality of time's arrow or the immanence of time's cycle. Gould follows these metaphors through these three great documents and shows how their influence, more than the empirical observation of rocks in the field, provoked the supposed discovery of deep time by Hutton and Lyell. Gould breaks through the traditional ''cardboard'' history of geological textbooks (the progressive march to truth inspired by more and better observations) by showing that Burnet, the villain of conventional accounts, was a rationalist (not a theologically driven miracle-monger) whose rich reconstruction of earth history emphasized the need for both time's arrow (narrative history) and time's cycle (immanent laws), while Hutton and Lyell, our traditional heroes, denied the richness of history by their exclusive focus upon time's Arrow.