Nicolas Steno is rarely heard of outside Intro to Geology, but anyone hoping to understand life on Earth should see how Steno expanded and connected those very concepts: Earth, life, and understanding. Born Niels Stensen in 1638 Denmark, son of a goldsmith, he was a sickly kid whose school chums died of plague. He survived to cut up corpses as an anatomist, studying organs shared across species. He found a duct in animal skulls that sends saliva to the mouth. He refuted Descartes' idea that only humans had a pineal gland, proving it wasn't the seat of the soul, arguably, the debut of neuroscience. Most remarkable for the time was his method. Steno never let ancient texts, Aristotelian metaphysics, or Cartesian deductions overrule empirical, experimental evidence. His vision, uncluttered by speculation or rationalization, went deep. Steno had seen how gallstones form in wet organs by accretion. They obeyed molding principles he knew from the goldsmith trade, rules useful across disciplines for understanding solids by their structural relationships. Later, the Grand Duke of Tuscany had him dissect a shark. Its teeth resembled tongue stones, odd rocks seen inside other rocks in Malta and the mountains near Florence. Pliny the Elder, old Roman naturalist, said these fell from the sky. In the Dark Ages, folks said they were snake tongues, petrified by Saint Paul. Steno saw that tongue stones were shark teeth and vice versa, with the same signs of structural growth. Figuring similar things are made in similar ways, he argued the ancient teeth came from ancient sharks in waters that formed rock around the teeth and became mountains. Rock layers were once layers of watery sediment, which would lay out horizontally, one atop another, oldest up to newest. If layers were deformed, tilted, cut by a fault or a canyon, that change came after the layer formed. Sounds simple today; back then, revolutionary. He'd invented stratigraphy and laid geology's ground work. By finding one origin for shark teeth from two eras by stating natural laws ruling the present also ruled the past, Steno planted seeds for uniformitarianism, the idea that the past was shaped by processes observable today. In the 18th and 19th centuries, English uniformitarian geologists, James Hutton and Charles Lyell, studied current, very slow rates of erosion and sedimentation and realized the Earth had to be way older than the biblical guestimate, 6000 years. Out of their work came the rock cycle, which combined with plate tectonics in the mid-twentieth century to give us the great molten-crusting, quaking, all-encircling theory of the Earth, from a gallstone to a 4.5 billion-year-old planet. Now think bigger, take it to biology. Say you see shark teeth in one layer and a fossil of an organism you've never seen under that. The deeper fossil's older, yes? You now have evidence of the origin and extinction of species over time. Get uniformitarian. Maybe a process still active today caused changes not just in rocks but in life. It might also explain similarities and differences between species found by anatomists like Steno. It's a lot to ponder, but Charles Darwin had the time on a long trip to the Galapagos, reading a copy of his friend Charles Lyell's "Principles of Geology," which Steno sort of founded. Sometimes giants stand on the shoulders of curious little people. Nicolas Steno helped evolve evolution, broke ground for geology, and showed how unbiased, empirical observation can cut across intellectual borders to deepen our perspective. His finest accomplishment, though, may be his maxim, casting the search for truth beyond our senses and our current understanding as the pursuit of the beauty of the as yet unknown. Beautiful is what we see, more beautiful is what we know, most beautiful, by far, is what we don't.
在地质学概论以外的地方, 很少有人听说过尼古拉斯·斯坦诺。 但是任何一个想要理解地球上的生命的人, 都应该看看斯坦诺如何扩展并连接了 这些个概念: 地球、生命、理解。 本名Niels Stensen,出生于1638年的丹麦, 父亲是一名金匠。 他年幼时多病, 而他的很多校友都死于瘟疫。 他活了下来 并成为一个尸体解剖学家, 研究不同物种间共有的器官。 他在动物头骨内 发现了输送唾液的管道。 他驳斥了笛卡尔的 只有人类有松果体腺的观点, 证明了它不是灵魂之所在, 这可以说是神经科学的开端。 就当时来说,最非凡的是他所采用的方法。 斯坦诺从来不让古文献, 如亚里士多德的形而上学 或者笛卡尔的演绎法, 影响到经验性的、实验性的证据。 通过推测和理性分析, 他的视野走向深远。 斯坦诺曾观察胆结石 如何在湿润的器官上累积生长。 其过程与他在金匠行业中 所习得的锻造原理相符合。 这些通过固体的结构间的关系 来了解固体的规则 对各个学科都有用。 后来,托斯卡纳大公 让他解剖了一条鲨鱼。 鲨鱼的牙齿和舌石相似, 是一种在其他石头中发现的奇怪石头, 在马耳他以及佛罗伦萨附近的山上可见。 古罗马时期的自然学家老普林尼 认为这些石头是从天上掉下来的。 在黑暗时代, 民谣中传说它们是蛇的舌头, 被圣保罗变成石头。 斯坦诺发现舌石就是鲨鱼的牙齿, 反之亦然, 因为它们有相同的结构生长迹象。 他认为类似的东西有着类似的形成过程, 他主张这些古代的牙齿 来自古代水中的鲨鱼, 岩石在牙齿周围生长 而后形成山脉。 岩层在早年曾是水系沉积物, 它们水平生长, 一层又一层, 从下层最古老的一直到上层最新的。 如果岩层变形、 倾斜、 被断层或峡谷切开, 这些变化都是在岩层形成后才发生的。 这在今天听起来很简单, 而当时这是革命性的。 他创立了地层学, 并为地质学奠定了基础。 通过发现来自不同时期的鲨鱼牙齿有着同一起源, 并陈述当前的自然规律 在过去也通用, 斯坦诺为均变论埋下了种子, 其中心思想是过去所发生的改变 和现在正在进行的作用方式相同。 到了18世纪和19世纪, 英国均变论地质学家 詹姆斯·赫顿和查尔斯·莱尔 研究了当前十分缓慢的 侵蚀和沉积过程, 意识到地球的年龄要远远老于 圣经中所猜测的6000年。 他们在研究中发现了岩石循环, 在20世纪中期 它和板块构造学说一起 给予了我们有着熔化的地壳、震动的、 包容万象的地球理论, 从一颗胆结石到一个45亿年历史的星球。 现在,往大处想, 来看看生物学。 假设你在某一岩层找到了鲨鱼牙齿, 在其下方找到了某种 你从未见过的生物的化石。 更深的化石年代更老,对吗? 你现在有证据表明 物种随着时间起源并灭绝。 拿均变论来说。 某一种过程可能现在仍在进行, 导致岩石、甚至生命发生变化。 这也可能解释了 由斯丹诺这样的解剖学家所发现的 物种间的相似和不同之处。 有很多可以思考的地方, 但是查尔斯·达尔文有时间 在前往加拉帕戈斯群岛的漫长旅途中 阅读其好友查尔斯·莱尔的书 《地质学原理》, 这可以说是斯坦诺所创立的学科。 有时伟人站在 好奇的小人物的肩膀上。 尼古拉斯·斯坦诺帮助发展了进化论 为地质学奠基, 并展示了无偏见的经验观察 如何能跨越知识的疆界 来深化我们的洞察力。 然而他最出色的成就 可能是他的格言, 超越我们的感官和现有的理解 来寻求真理, 如同追寻未知之美。 我们所见的很美, 我们所知的更美, 而最美的是我们所未知的。