Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform

by Martin J.S. Rudwick

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, scientists reconstructed the immensely long history of the earth—and the relatively recent arrival of human life. The geologists of the period, many of whom were devout believers, agreed about this vast timescale. But despite this apparent harmony between geology and Genesis, these scientists still debated a great many Had the earth cooled from its origin as a fiery ball in space, or had it always been the same kind of place as it is now? Was prehuman life marked by mass extinctions, or had fauna and flora changed slowly over time?

The first detailed account of the reconstruction of prehuman geohistory, Martin J. S. Rudwick’s Worlds Before Adam picks up where his celebrated Bursting the Limits of Time leaves off. Here, Rudwick takes readers from the post-Napoleonic Restoration in Europe to the early years of Britain’s Victorian age, chronicling the staggering discoveries geologists made during the the unearthing of the first dinosaur fossils, the glacial theory of the last ice age, and the meaning of igneous rocks, among others. Ultimately, Rudwick reveals geology to be the first of the sciences to investigate the historical dimension of nature, a model that Charles Darwin used in developing his evolutionary theory.

Featuring an international cast of colorful characters, with Georges Cuvier and Charles Lyell playing major roles and Darwin appearing as a young geologist, Worlds Before Adam is a worthy successor to Rudwick’s magisterial first volume. Completing the highly readable narrative of one of the most momentous changes in human understanding of our place in the natural world, Worlds Before Adam is a capstone to the career of one of the world’s leading historians of science.

Genres: Science, History, History Of Science, Geology, Nonfiction

648 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 2008

About the author

Martin John Spencer Rudwick is a British geologist, historian, and academic. He is an emeritus professor of History at the University of California, San Diego and an affiliated research scholar at Cambridge University's Department of History and Philosophy of Science.

His principal field of study is the history of the earth sciences; his work has been described as the "definitive histories of the pre-Darwinian earth sciences".

Rudwick was awarded the Sue Tyler Friedman Medal in 1988. In 2008, he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA). He was the recipient of the 2007 George Sarton Medal from the History of Science Society.

Reviews

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book and its companion volume, Bursting the Limits of Time, are perhaps the single best illustration of how the scientific method is supposed to work I have ever read. I would recommend these not only to those interested in geology and paleontology but also to readers interested in the history of science or the Reformation and Enlightenment eras.

Full of powerful and colorful personalities, rivalries both personal and national, and illustrating how science began to reshape the view of Biblical inerrancy both amongst the educated classes but even among the general population, Dr. Rudwick has here written a masterpiece of science history.