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Title: The Seashell on the Mountaintop
ISBN: 0452285461
Author:
Alan Cutler
Publicate Date: 2004-04-27
Publish: 2004-04-27
List Price: $15.00
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Paperback
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1: Fascinating History of Science
Ever wonder why there are seashells in rocks or in buildings made out of rocks? Nicholaus Steno did too, and through his inquiry and investigation, discovered the geologic concept of "deep time"- discovering the age of the earth by examining the sedimentary layers.
Steno was a Danish scientist who originally went into anatomy. His brilliant lectures demolished Decartes' theories on the brain, and paved the way for new understandings of anatomy. His interest in fossils was sparked by a shark's head that he was using for one of his lectures. The "tongue stones" in the shark's mouth looked remarkably similar to the ones that he had seen in rocks. At the time, most people thought that fossils literally grew inside rocks, through "plastic forces of nature." (The scientific world had not yet outgrown Aristotle's physics.) Steno argued that the fossils could not possibly grow inside rocks, because they weren't distorted the way that objects that actually did grow inside rocks were. He eventually came to the conclusion that the seashell fossils inside the mountains were the result of the ocean once covering entire areas, and that sediments, in which fossils were trapped, layered on top of each other. Steno's discovery made Bishop Ussher's creation date of 4004 BC untenable, since it would have taken the seas far longer to recede than Noah's flood was supposed to have lasted.
This book is highly recommended for anyone who is interested in the history of scientific discovery, and how someone's curiosity can change the way people think about the world.
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2: A Pleasure to Read
We are privileged to live in a Golden Age of writing about the history of science. Several other reviewers have already sung the praises, aptly, of this book, so I will merely recommend a few other titles. If you enjoy this book, you'll also enjoy: The Ice Finders; The Man Who Discovered Time; Out of the Flames; The Lunar Men; World on Fire.
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3: A gem
Only a small minority of books on science or scientists manage to discuss the historical relation between science and religion with anything approaching balance and accuracy. This book is excellent in that regard. Cutler does not appear to be religious himself, yet he has a very sound grasp of the complex historic interplay between science and religion. The book is very readable, and gives a fascinating picture of how people in various ages saw the history of the earth.
I cannot refrain from correcting some mistakes of Mr. Raul Goulden below. First, Steno/Stensen was never sent to the city of which he was made "titular bishop". That never happens. Mr. Goulden misunderstands what is meant by a "titular bishop". Every bishop in the Catholic Church is given, in addition to his actual diocese, a purely ceremonial title as bishop of some diocese that is no longer in existence. (There is a kind of custom that dioceses never go out of legal existence, so that dioceses that existed in ancient times, but where there is no longer a city or where the population is now Muslim, say, still exist "on the books".) Stensen was never actually sent to a place in the Muslim world, as Goulden supposes. He was given a real diocese in northern (predominantly Lutheran) Europe. There he labored in very difficult conditions for the salvation of souls and the better treatment of the poor. There was nothing tragic about the end of his life, but rather (from a Christian point of view) something quite glorious. Second, Steno/Stensen did not convert because of love of ritual, but, as Cutler makes very clear in the book, for serious theological reasons, and after a deep study of early Church history.
Back to science: as a scientist who has read many books on science history and many biographies of scientists, I can attest that this is one of the very best. A gem.
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4: An Unknown Accomplished Man
This geologist is a wonderful storyteller. Cutler lets the reader feel the doubt, grace and turmoil (of which there was much) in Steno's life. Steno's Principals (superposition, original horizontality, and lateral continuity), seem to us now to be simply common sense. However, the prevalent religious thinking at the time they were announced was in strong conflict. Superposition is not obvious if you believe the entire earth, including all the layers, was created on the same day.
Steno, a Dane, started as a brilliant anatomist, wandering Europe dissecting and teaching. He proposed the idea that muscular action comes from the contraction of muscle fibers not the ballooning of the muscle mass, the accuracy of which was not recognized for a hundred years. All the while he was also studying the topography of Europe, finally ending up as a ward of the Medici in Florence. As Medieval universities were founded not to "...create new knowledge as to preserve old knowledge," it was the home he needed Ferdinando and Leopoldo de Medici were wealthy and interested in science. They founded a research institution, the "Academy of Experiments" to which Steno came as an anatomist, arriving at about the same time as the head of a great white shark. He dissected it and recognized that its teeth were identical to "tongue stones" that had been found on Malta. That, along with fossils that had been found in the Alps and the Alpines in Italy, led him to conclude that much of Europe had been covered by water and not just once simply to launch Noah, but again and again. He realized that layering represented a sequence that was assembled from the inside out. This was doubly revolutionary in that it was contrary to Descartes who had asserted that the earth had cooled from the outside in.
Steno lived only forty-eight years, moving about much of his life. Born in a very Lutheran country, he later converted to Catholicism, ending his life as an impoverished bishop in Germany. It is not clear why. Cutler introduces us to Steno's predecessors in thought, Descartes, for example, and his "method of doubt," along with Spinoza, and Leibneiz, both of whom became friends. Steno lived in difficult times, the Thirty Years War raged and death from the plague was everywhere. And yet, although he was constantly diverted in thought, he devoted himself to the earth as he did the human body, dissecting sedimentary depositions as an anatomist. While others had found fossils in rocks, they assumed that they grew there. Steno wondered why he did not find any in the earth and if they grew in the rocks why did they not crack them? The undistorted fossil shells indicated to him that they had been entombed.
This is a well written, slim introduction to the fascinating life of a scientist who deserves a complete biography. Like Steno's published writing, De Solido, it is just a summary. While his writings were eagerly awaited by the Royal Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge, Steno never published his promised dissertation. It would have provided the detailed support for the conclusions and principles he set forth in De Solido. That was left to James Hutton, the inventor of modern geology to do a century later. Given the plethora of detailed biographies of marginal politicians which have been published in the recent past it is a mystery why the life of a seminal thinker has not been thoroughly examined.
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5: Very interesting biography, and well-told. The author stays out of the way of the story.
This was a very good book, and it's interesting in several different ways. On the one hand, it's a biography of Nicolaus Steno (which is the modern version of his scientific name, Nicolai Stenoni, which is an adaptation of his real name, Niels Steensen). It's also a history of the foundation of the science of geology, and it's a window into the early days of scientific exploration (before you object and raise the Greeks as an issue, it should be noted that despite their many studies, they never developed the scientific method, or experimental science). Many people unknowingly project our modern attitudes and opinions into the past, taking for granted the ideas of technology and knowledge. Because of that, we often forget that in the past, science and religion were not seen as diametrically opposed. Steno, who basically discovered stratigraphy and whose discoveries implied an age for the Earth older than Ussher's 6,000 years, or any other age based on a literal interpretation of the Bible, was a devout Lutheran who converted to Catholicism and spent the last few years of his life as a Catholic priest on a mission to convert protestants back to Catholicism. The main reason Steno converted was because he could not believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, but that never altered his views about the existence of God or that God was the driving force behind the world. As a matter of fact, the men of science of Steno's time were studying science in order to find God in the world. That's why many such men were priests, and most men who weren't priests were still devoutly religious, such as Sir Isaac Newton.
Steno was born the son of a goldsmith in Copenhagen, Denmark (which was Lutheran) in 1638. He was born with copious manual dexterity and practiced it when he went to school to become an anatomist. And of course you must note that he started an anatomist, but his most famous discoveries were as a geologist and he ended life as a Catholic priest. This testifies to his many talents and mental prowess. Basically though, it all ties together. He was always a religious man, and he was exploring the beauty of God's creation when he dissected humans or animals. When a shark's head was brought to him for dissection, he noticed the similarity between the shark's teeth and "glossopetrae", or tongue stones that supposedly were natural formations that emanated from the Earth. Philosophers had tried to explain the formation of rocks in the Earth for a long time, but had never successfully explained how rocks could be formed that looked like seashells and shark teeth inside other rocks.
Basically this lead him to conclude that the only way it was possible was if the fossils had been there first and the rocks grew up around them. This led him to formulate the theory of sedimentation, which is that layers of rock are laid down on the bottom of a body of water. This property could be clearly observed even at their times on the small scales of buckets of dirty water or riverbeds. Steno understood the implications of those phenomena, and coupled that with his observations of the layers of rock evident in the mountains of Italy to come up with the new theory that the surface of the Earth was made by sedimentary layers. He also devised principles about these layers, called: the law of superposition, the principle of original horizontality, and the principle of lateral continuity. This is where you can see that by observing nature in order to find God, he found a natural process that works without any intervention from God. But even though that was just a few years after the Catholic church had punished Galileo, they didn't have a problem with Steno's work because their doctrine allowed that whatever was plainly observable must be true (something I wish biblical literalists would understand!)
In the debate over the correctness of Steno's arguments, which took place mostly after his death, the argument was never made that Steno's theory violated Christian belief in any way. Other Christian scientists either supported it or didn't, but never on the basis of conflict with written scripture.
Even if you don't read much non-fiction and aren't interested in geology, I would still say this book is interesting simply because it demonstrates some surprising things about the world and the people in it. Read it!
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