Paul > Recent Status Updates

This is horribly like playing Civilizations and having your Renaissance cavalry unit find a continent-wide civilization still at Stone Age tech level and wiping their entire army out by itself. Only these were real people.

Just when I think he's done quoting some Frenchman at prodigious length and arguing with him, he starts again.

The best case scenario for this book was to be packed with interesting history as well as being supremely depressing, and that's pretty much where we're at.

As I recall others had to step in and write their own accounts of Hutton's plutonist insights, and I can definitely see why. What a tedious, confusing, arrogant slog this book is. What a shortsighted idiot arguing with other shortsighted idiots. Fascinating how science, and geology specifically, somehow emerged from all this rot.

Gosh, this is a slog. I keep going because I really am curious what an 18th century perspective on geology could be, and so far it's pretty depressing. The slapdash generalizations and catastrophically arrogant arguments about the processes that formed various classes of rocks make great reminders of the need for intellectual humility.

Chapter 1 was intriguing, and I read it in 2021. Chapter 2 I finally returned to and finished slogging through; it's an incredible example of terrible science, in which Hutton convinces himself that hydrothermal alteration and even diagenesis do not exist; it's all "fusion" [melting or at least softening by heat] doncha know. I mean, it's obvious, look at the texture. Absolute proof of my point. Case closed. Yeeech.