uniformitarianism

[‚yü·nə‚fȯr·mə′ter·ē·ə‚niz·əm]

(geology)

Classically, the concept that the present is the key to the past; the principle that contemporary geologic processes have occurred in the same regular manner and with essentially the same intensity throughout geologic time, and that events of the geologic past can be explained by phenomena observable today. Also known as actualism; principle of uniformity.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Uniformitarianism

a concept in geology proceeding from a belief in the immutability of geological factors. The term was first used by the British scientist W. Whewell (1832), who applied it to the teachings of C. Lyell.

In essence, uniformitarianism affirmed a mechanistic view of nature; it held that the laws of nature were eternal and unchanging, that the forces that acted in the geological past were the same as those acting in the present, and that forces in the past acted with the same intensity and rate as those in the present. From this followed Lyell’s well-known thesis of the uniformity of the system of the earth’s changes through all geological periods. This thesis ruled out progressive development inasmuch as only changes occurring on the same level in the history of the earth and of life on the earth were affirmed. As a result, uniformitarianism came under attack. The criticism became intense after the appearance of Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859, since the theory of natural selection admitted a tendency toward progress, and this was inconsistent with uniformity.

In the 20th century, it has been established that the history of the external envelopes of the earth (atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, lithosphere) shows features of irreversible development; the evolution of the earth and its inhabitants has been accepted.

REFERENCES

“K voprosu o periodichnosti osadkoobrazovaniia i o metode aktualizma v geologii.” In the collection K voprosu o sostoianii nauki ob osadochnykh porodakh. Moscow, 1951.
Ravikovich, A. I. Razvitie osnovnykh teoreticheskikh napravlenii v geologii XIX v. Moscow, 1969. (Trudy geologicheskogo in-ta AN SSSR, fasc. 189.)
Whewell, W. “Changes in the Organic World Now in Progress.” Quarterly Review, 1832, vol. 47, no. 93.
Huxley, T. H. “Geological Reform.” In his book Collected Essays, vol. 8. London, 1908.

A. I. RAVIKOVICH

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References in periodicals archive

Lyellian uniformitarianism is baked into the form of In Memoriam, she asserts: its more than seven hundred quatrains are a poetic counterpart to Lyell's model of repeated small actions over time that generate great change, while the ongoing dialectic within and across sections from despair to faith and back again exemplifies the steady state of a nonteleological, nonprogressive system.

Tennyson

Phylogeography, fossils, and Northern Hemisphere biogeography: The role of physiological uniformitarianism. Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden 95: 135-143.

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Scenes in Ohio during the last Ice Age: address of the President of The Ohio Academy of Science delivered at the 68th Annual Meeting at Capital University, Bexley, Ohio on 17 April 1959

Time and the intimately linked concept of uniformitarianism, there could be no Charles Darwin and no evolution.

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Finally, his interest in Hutton's theories and the uniformitarianism principle led him to believe that Earth had been formed millions of years ago--a heretical idea in those times.

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(There is little appreciation of the way natural selection theory, for example, testifies to the efforts of an intensely creative and literary imagination.) The narrow, biological, adaptive materialism of evolutionary theory, which consummately expressed an emerging scientific consensus about the origin and development of humankind, fell victim to uniformitarianism as did geologists such as Charles Lyell--that is, to the assumption that change occurs at an unvarying rate--while being methodologically blind to the supposed truth of much larger schemes of historical change posited by Steiner.

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