Such was the confusion that by the close of the nineteenth century, depending on which text you consulted, you could learn that the number of years that stood between us and the dawn of complex life in the Cambrian period was 3 million, 18 million, 600 million, 794 million, or 2.4 billion – or some other number within that range. Other people came up with their own values similarly for the dawn of complex life. In 1862, Lord Kelvin suggested that the Earth was 98 million years old. In the 1770s, the Frenchman Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon estimated the age of the Earth as being somewhere between 75,000 and 168,000 years old based on the rate at which it was radiating heat. We start in 1650, when Archbishop James Ussher of the Church of Ireland made a careful study of the Bible and concluded that the Earth had been created at midday on 23 October 4000 BC (you may laugh, but I know folks who believe this to this day). Human beings would split the atom and invent television, nylon and instant coffee before they could figure out the age of their own planet.īryson then returns to this topic many times throughout the course of the book as different people and scientific disciplines added more to the picture. Consider the age of the earth, for example. Another strength of the book is the way information is built up in layers.
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