{"id":305,"date":"2021-01-13T09:29:46","date_gmt":"2021-01-13T09:29:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/biopedia.co.uk\/?p=305"},"modified":"2021-01-13T09:29:47","modified_gmt":"2021-01-13T09:29:47","slug":"the-perspective-shift-of-evolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/biopedia.co.uk\/?p=305","title":{"rendered":"The perspective shift of evolution"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Image: Pixabay<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I just wanted to share something that I’ve recently been delving into a bit more thanks to my studies- namely, the age of the Earth people commonly accepted before the theory of evolution as proposed by Darwin and Wallace in 1859 came along. I thought it might give some idea of how big a shift in perspective would have been needed for the average person back in 1859.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, how old was the Earth commonly accepted to be? Well, it was mostly calculated using the generations and ages listed in the Bible. There’s a YouTube video published in 2020<\/a> which uses the chronology to calculate that, if people used the text literally, the world would have been thought to have been created in 4163 BCE<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The chronology that I think is most often cited is that of James Ussher, an Irish bishop. His date is 4004 BCE<\/a>, which indicates that a sort of consensus appears to be forming between these old thinkers that the Earth was perceived to be roughly six thousand years old.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Consider, then, the contrast between this number and the age of the Earth which we’ve calculated today- about 4.54 billion years<\/a>. Let’s suppose we make the number calculated by Ussher (5863 years old in 1859) equivalent to one step (which I’m going to approximate as a metre for the sake of my calculations). To walk this new age of the Earth, you would have to travel over 774 kilometres- very roughly 484 miles. For context, Google maps tells me that’s a longer journey than driving from Portsmouth to Edinburgh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of this is to say that the theory proposed isn’t correct- there’s a wealth of biological evidence to back it up. However, I find myself agreeing with the sentiment I saw expressed by Stephen Jay Gould<\/a>– just because their ages of the Earth turned out to be wrong, doesn’t mean that we should deride the people behind it for that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n