---
title: "Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle"
chunk: 3/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time's_Arrow,_Time's_Cycle"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:34:40.309869+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== From steady state to progressionism ===
Nor was Lyell's eventual conversion to evolution a strictly empirical affair. When he finally took this step publicly, in 1868, it was not because he had been persuaded by Darwin's theory of natural selection. In fact, Lyell rejected that theory, accepting only a general evolutionary process without its celebrated Darwinian mechanism.
Admitting nonmiraculous progression (that is, evolution) in turn allowed him to preserve three of his four uniformities (uniformity of law, process, and rate) while giving up only uniformity of state.  This was as Gould notes, "the most conservative intellectual option available to him."
Charles Lyell may have lost the battle over progressionism to Darwinism, but through rhetoric he won a battle against catastrophism, which enabled his hypothesis of the uniformity of rate to become a textbook shibboleth.
The catastrophists of Lyell's day, Gould nevertheless maintains, were right all along.  The literal fossil evidence of major rapid changes in previous faunas does not need to be interpreted away, as Lyell tried to do by appealing to the imperfection of the geological record.
Gould sees supreme irony in the recent hypothesis of the Berkeley scientists Luis and Walter Alvarez that mass extinctions were caused by asteroidal or cometary impacts (a hypothesis now made plausible by the discovery of a worldwide iridium layer deposited at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary); for this is precisely the sort of wild "cosmological" speculation that Lyell derided in seventeenth-century writers like William Whiston.
Gould concludes Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle by insisting that arrows and cycles are "eternal metaphors" in the understanding of time. In a thoughtful complement to his discussion of the history of geology, he shows how these two metaphors have figured in the art and sculpture associated with major biblical themes.  Both metaphors, he concludes, are needed "for any comprehensive view of history."

== Notes ==

== References ==
The article is based upon the following book reviews:

Sulloway, Frank (May 28, 1987). "The Metaphor and the Rock: A Review of Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle by Stephen Jay Gould". The New York Review of Books. 34.
Wallace, David R. (1987). "It's an Old, Old, Old, Old World". New York Times.
"Stephen Jay Gould Books". National Center for Science Education. Retrieved 2011-08-14.

== Further reading ==
Additional book reviews include:

Retzinger, J. P. (1989). "Book Review". Iowa Journal of Literary Studies. 10 (1): 158–161. doi:10.17077/0743-2747.1334.
Taylor, Kenneth L. (1987). "Review". Isis. 78 (4): 608–609. doi:10.1086/354574. JSTOR 231940.
Wood, Robert Muir (May 7, 1987). "The real history of geology". New Scientist (1559): 55.

== External links ==
Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle on-line

== Details ==
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN 0-674-89198-8 (Hardback 1987)
ISBN 0-674-89199-6 (Paperback 1988)
Language: English