What We Believe and the Geologic Record
In our human history, what we believe, as individuals, as groups, as cultures, as nations, as genders, as children matters. What we believe becomes our reality. In researching the history of Earth for my latest project, a to-scale illustrated geologic timeline, I am encountering many fascinating aspects about our beliefs and the way knowledge and information change us. It wasn't until the mid 1800's that Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace independently came up with the idea of natural selection to explain evolutionary changes that the fossil record was beginning to reveal (Darwin/Wallace) . The work of these two biologists was preceded by work in the field of Geology. The early work in geology and paleontology got the biologists thinking about how species changed and why species became extinct. Around 1800, a British canal surveyor named William Smith , who had little formal education, began to notice patterns of fossils in the roc...