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Topic: Uniformitarianism (science)

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	Uniformitarianism: World of Earth Science
		The concept of uniformitarianism is commonly oversimplified in geological textbooks as "the present is a guide to interpreting the past" (or words to that effect).
		In 1837, the name uniformitarianism was coined by William Whewell (1794–1866) as a term meant to convey Hutton's sense of order and regularity in the operation of nature and Lyell's sense that there was a uniformity of rates of geological processes through time.
		Most scientists argue that uniformitarianism should be kept in its proper historical perspective in the future, and that a more specific term like actualism might supplant uniformitarianism in places where the word is meant to convey strictly the modern concept of uniformity of causes.
	www.enotes.com /earth-science/uniformitarianism (851 words)

	Uniformitarianism (science) Summary
		Uniformitarianism has its philosophical roots in antiquity, but it was refined and popularized by British scientists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries: notably James Hutton, John Playfair, Charles Lyell, and William Whewell (who coined the term).
		Uniformitarianism is one of the most basic principles of modern geology, the observation that fundamentally the same geological processes that operate today also operated in the distant past.
		Uniformitarianism is a generalisation of the principle of actualism, which states that present day-processes (astronomical, geological, paleontological,...) can be used to interpret past patterns.
	www.bookrags.com /Uniformitarianism_(science) (2194 words)

	History of Science: Early Modern Geology (Site not responding. Last check: )
		However, since he was well aware that the inconsistent facts in the fossil record were a weak point in his theory of a constant rate of change, he appealed to the future: continued research would yield further evidence for his ideas by filling in the gaps in the fossil record (13).
		Uniformitarianism, as it later developed, involved at least three important assumptions about the continuity of physical processes of the present and the past: (a) that they were the same in kind and proceeded in the same way, (b) that they were the same in intensity, and (c) that they occurred at the same rate (14).
		Geology is the science which investigates the successive changes that have taken place in the organic and inorganic kingdoms of nature; it enquires into the causes of these changes, and the influence which they have exerted in modifying the surface and external structure of the planet.
	www.mala.bc.ca /~johnstoi/darwin/sect2.htm (9162 words)

	AllRefer.com - uniformitarianism (Geology And Oceanography) - Encyclopedia
		uniformitarianism, in geology, doctrine holding that changes in the earth's surface that occurred in past geologic time are referable to the same causes as changes now being produced upon the earth's surface.
		It made little progress, however, against the teachings of the school of Abraham Gottlob Werner, a German geologist, and as a theory of dynamic geology it was overshadowed by the doctrine of catastrophism, of which the major supporter was the French naturalist G. Cuvier.
		Uniformitarianism had its day in the 19th cent., when it was widely accepted as a result of the efforts of the English geologist Sir Charles Lyell.
	reference.allrefer.com /encyclopedia/U/uniformi.html (357 words)

	Old Earth Creation Science, Catastrophism or Uniformitarianism?
		Uniformitarianism â“ The belief or principle that the past history of the earth and its inhabitants is best interpreted in terms of what is known about the present.
		Uniformitarianism explains the past by appealing to known laws and principles acting in a gradual, uniform way through past ages.
		The problem is that young earth creation science proponents use these events to say the Flood caused it, and the old earth proponents say these catastrophic events occurred, but not during a single flood event, but through many separate, local flood events.
	www.answersincreation.org /catastrophism.htm (657 words)

	Science News Online 75th Anniversary Essay (Site not responding. Last check: )
		Uniformitarianism teaches that the history of the world has been shaped by the same slow processes that can be seen today wearing away mountains or replacing one species with another.
		Although paleontologists have known about these biological turning points since the early 1800s, the reign of uniformitarian thinking predisposed them to explain away the mass extinctions as gradual transitions foreshortened by gaps in the fossil record.
		In the wake of last summer's report of a meteorite bearing possible signs of ancient Martian life, biologists are considering anew the idea that life originated elsewhere and then hitched a ride to Earth on a random rock.
	www.sciencenews.org /sn_arc97/75th/rm_essay.htm (864 words)

	Science and Revelation
		Science assumes a rational universe, and laws of nature which are the same everywhere, and laws which are applicable both in the microscopic and macroscopic worlds.
		As long as a scientist conducts his work by the rules of science, he or she should never be shut out of the lab, or the classroom, because of a belief system that differs from that of the majority, or one that is at the moment not the most popular point of view.
		Science is only just beginning to understand the workings of the brain (let alone the mind), and attempts to explain man's innermost workings on the basis of physics, chemistry, and electricity make us seem like extensions of the material world.
	www.ldolphin.org /scilim.shtml (2951 words)

	Controversy. Catastrophism and Evolution: The Ongoing Debate
		Uniformitarianism was formulated by Charles Lyell in a geological context, but many of its principles and attitudes were adopted by Charles Darwin for his theory of evolution, subsequently developed into the Modern Synthesis.
		Actualistic uniformitarianism, the principle that physical processes operate according to unchanging laws, was widely acclaimed by scientists of all persuasions, then and subsequently.
		Nevertheless, an unnecessary association was established between actualistic and substantive uniformitarianism and, since no global catastrophes had apparently been observed in historical times, uniformitarianism came to imply gradualism, this being stretched to include minor catastrophist elements such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
	www.knowledge.co.uk /sis/controv.htm (2951 words)

	ScienceDaily: Superfloods Continue To Generate Heat In Earth Science
		Science Daily — Around 15,000 years ago, as the last ice age was melting down, you didn't want to be standing in Idaho's Clark Fork River Valley.
		First, there's uniformitarianism, which postulates that the landscape we see today was formed gradually by the everyday processes that we see around us.
		Uniformitarianism says canyons and valleys are formed over tens of thousands of years, not in a few hours by catastrophic floods.
	www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2002/04/020402075852.htm (1180 words)

	The Philosophy of Science (Site not responding. Last check: )
		Science draws conclusions about the way the world is and the way in which scientific theory relates to the world.
		Science draws upon evidence from experimentation, logical deduction, and rational thought in order to examine the world and the individuals that exist within society.
		In the case of science, the system is usually taken to be the complete set of beliefs of an individual or of the community of scientists.
	dks.thing.net /ThePhilOfSci.html (5590 words)

	Creation Bits Number 12
		Uniformitarianism says that everything has developed very slowly, through strictly natural processes, with no supernatural intervention.
		In practice, index fossils are used to date a new rock stratum, but at the same time a new fossil is dated according to the age of the rock stratum in which it's found.
		They say that since God is outside of the realm of natural science, we must reject the thought that He ever actually did anything physical that would affect what we see in the world today.
	www.rae.org /bits12.htm (1370 words)

	In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood - Final Thoughts
		Earth science students are frequently discouraged from considering alternative explanations such as we have examined concerning the frozen mammoths.
		Uniformitarianism was intended to banish the global flood.
		Some try to redefine uniformitarianism to mean that only the laws of physics observed today can be used to explain past geological events—an obvious principle of science long before uniformitarianism was sanctified.
	www.creationscience.com /onlinebook/FrozenMammoths19.html (750 words)

	Uniformitarianism - CreationWiki, the encyclopedia of creation science
		When Lyellian gradualism and steady-stateism began gaining momentum during the 19th century and into the 20th century, uniformitarianism was contrasted with catastrophism as the explanation for major geological and paleontological phenomena.
		However creation science has provided a conceptual framework to support the idea that the speed of light may have varied in the past.
		This is an idea that has been accepted increasingly as a topic for study by cosmologists, as existing "paradoxes" for the Big bang scenario and new astronomical evidence was found that implied a slowing.
	creationwiki.org /Uniformitarianism (1855 words)

	Rocky Road: Alfred Wegener
		Thanks largely to Charles Lyell, 19th-century geology had adopted the theory of uniformitarianism, the idea that the world we see is the result of consistent cycles occurring over vast expanses of time.
		Catastrophism, the prevailing belief before uniformitarianism — and one influenced by the Old Testament — argued that the world we see is the result of extreme events like worldwide floods and volcanoes.
		Uniformitarianism works, provided you extrapolate from a time span long enough to include 100-year floods, movement of continental plates and other processes too extreme to be considered "everyday." Uniformitarianism and catastrophism aren't that contradictory after all.
	www.strangescience.net /wegener.htm (501 words)

	Science - All About GOD
		- The opposite of Uniformitarianism and the Geologic Time Scale.
		Catastrophism versus Uniformitarianism — Where does the evidence lead?
		- Science teaches that organic life sprung from non-organic matter through a natural mechanistic process on a pre-biotic earth.
	www.allaboutgod.com /science.htm (1556 words)

	Uniformitarianism
		Uniformitarianism is the doctrine that existing processes acting in the same manner and with essentially the same intensity as at present are sufficient to account for all geologic change.
		Uniformitarianism posits that natural agents now at work on and within the Earth have operated with general uniformity through immensely long periods of time.
		In contrast to the catastrophic view of geology, the principle of uniformity postulates that phenomena displayed in the rocks may be entirely accounted for by geologic processes that continue to operate at the present day--in other words, the present is the key to the past.
	abyss.uoregon.edu /~js/glossary/uniformitarianism.html (688 words)

	Uniformitarianism, A Piss Poor Science Assumption \| MattFarina.com
		Education uniformitarianism is, "in geology, doctrine holding that changes in the earth's surface that occurred in past geologic time are referable to the same causes as changes now being produced upon the earth's surface." What does this mean?
		Uniformitarianism is a piss poor assumption because the evidence does not support it.
		This is important to understand because uniformitarianism is one of the assumptions of the sciences that study the past.
	www.mattfarina.com /2006/10/17/uniformitarianism_a_piss_poor_science_assumption (3464 words)

	Uniformitarianism
		The doctrine of Uniformitarianism was significantly advanced by James Hutton (1726-1797) in his publication, Theory of the Earth (1785).
		Lyell is responsible for the general acceptance of Uniformitarianism among geologists for the past 150 years.
		He convinced geologists that because physical laws are constant in time and space and current processes should be consulted before resorting to unseen processes, it necessarily follows that all past processes acted at essentially their current rates (that is, those observed in historical time).
	www.allaboutcreation.org /uniformitarianism.htm (407 words)

	Angelqueen.org :: View topic - "Science must work to 'weaken hold of religion'" (Site not responding. Last check: )
		Sponsored by the Science Network, an educational organization based in California, and underwritten by a San Diego investor, Robert Zeps, the La Jolla meeting was titled "Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival.” With atheists and agnostics in the majority, one speaker after another attacked religious belief for allegedly stifling scientific inquiry.
		Louis Pasteur, one of the founders of the science of bacteriology.
		Science is the study of the admitted laws of existence; it cannot prove a universal negative about whether those laws could ever be suspended by something admittedly above them....
	angelqueen.org /forum/viewtopic.php?p=139072 (5986 words)

	Catastrophism, Neocatastrophism and Evolution
		Uniformitarianism was formulated by Charles Lyell in a geological context but its principles and attitudes were adopted by Charles Darwin for his theory of evolution, subsequently developed into the Modern Synthesis.
		With the demolition of the myth that the nineteenth century catastrophists were driven by religious dogma, there remains no reason for having to distinguish between catastrophism and neocatastrophism in the twentieth century.
		Professor Trevor Palmer is Head of the Department of Life Sciences and Dean of the Faculty of Science at the Nottingham Trent University.
	www.knowledge.co.uk /sis/catneo.htm (2191 words)

	The Ancients Knew of the Global Flood (Site not responding. Last check: )
		The theory of uniformitarianism is an antipodal view of the earth's processes as described by the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
		Lyell's theory of uniformitarianism, based on Hutton's idea that the present is the key to the past, revolutionized geology and provided the foundation for Darwin's forthcoming theory of evolution.
		[uniformitarianism] For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, [creation] and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished.
	www.nwcreation.net /articles/evolutionexposed.html (8127 words)

	Evolution IS science
		Next, science assumes that the laws by which the universe are uniform over a significant span of space and time, an assumption called uniformitarianism.
		One important characteristic of science is its reliance on the scientific method as the tool to understand the physical universe.
		Science is a human institution but dishonesty is found out sooner or later because results must be repeatable or claims about an object must be able to stand up to increasing scrutiny as new methods of study.
	staff.jccc.net /pdecell/essays/sciencetxt.html (2810 words)

	Early Theories of Evolution: Glossary of Terms
		Catastrophism was opposed by uniformitarianism during the late 18th and 19th centuries.
		Genetics is the branch of science that deals with the inheritance of biological characteristics.
		the branch of science concerned with the rules for naming, describing, and classification of organisms into different categories on the basis of evolutionary relationships.
	anthro.palomar.edu /evolve/glossary.htm (1344 words)

	History of geology--Lomonosov
		Lomonosov occupies a central place in the history of Russian science, and he is memorialized in place names and honorary scientific medals.
		The St. Petersburg Academy of Science was highly respected in Europe; it was staffed at this time mainly by foreign scientists, for example Lehmann.
		He was made an honorary member of the Swedish Academy of Science in 1760 and became an honorary member of the Bologna Academy of Science in 1764.
	academic.emporia.edu /aberjame/histgeol/lomonos/lomonos.htm (936 words)

	There are no transitional fossils
		The concept of uniformitarianism does not enter the picture until the attempt is made to use evolutionary theory (biological present) to explain the fossils record (paleobiological past).
		Uniformitarianism falsifies many of the claims made by creationists concerning their literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis.
		By specifically invoking methodological uniformitarianism, we do little more than affirm that induction is procedurally valid in geology...As a special term, methodological uniformitarianism was useful only when science was debating the status of the supernatural in its realm; for if God intervenes, then laws are not invariant and induction becomes invalid.
	www.digisys.net /users/hoppnrmt/transitionfossils.htm (4183 words)

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