評論
打印
By the middle of the nineteenth century most learned people thought the Earth was at least a few million years old, perhaps even some tens of millions of years old, but probably not more than that. So it came as a surprise when, in 1859 in On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin announced that the geological processes that created the Weald, an area of southern England stretching across Kent, Surrey, and Sussex, had taken, by his calculations, 306,662,400 years to complete.
到19世紀中葉，大多數學者認為地球的年齡起碼有幾百萬年，甚至也許幾千萬年，但也很可能沒有那么大。因此，當1859年查爾斯·達爾文在《物種起源》一書中宣稱，根據他的計算，創造威爾德地區——英格蘭南部的一個地區，包括肯特、薩里和蘇塞克斯——的地質進程花了306662400年時間才完成時，人們不由得大吃一驚。
The assertion was remarkable partly for being so arrestingly specific but even more for flying in the face of accepted wisdom about the age of the Earth. Darwin loved an exact number. In a later work, he announced that the number of worms to be found in an average acre of English country soil was 53,767. It proved so contentious that Darwin withdrew it from the third edition of the book. The problem at its heart remained, however. Darwin and his geological friends needed the Earth to be old, but no one could figure out a way to make it so.
這個結論是很了不起的，部分原因是他說得那么確切，但更因為是他公然不顧公認的有關地球年齡的看法。達爾文熱衷于用精確的數字表達。在隨后的一部著作中，他發表文章稱英國農村的土壤中，每英畝可找到的蠕蟲數量有53767之多結果，它引起了激烈的爭議，達爾文在該書的第三版中收回了他的看法。然而，問題實際上依然存在。達爾文和他的地質界朋友希望地球很古老，但誰也想不出辦法。
