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.
尼古拉斯·斯蒂諾這個人 在地質學界外鮮為人知 但任何想了解地球上生命的人 都應該看看斯蒂諾如何擴充及連結 正是這些概念: 地球、生命及了解 他的丹麥語名為尼爾斯·斯滕森 於 1638 年在丹麥出生 是金匠的兒子 他體弱多病 同窗摯友死於黑死病 他活了下來成為剖屍的 解剖學家 研究物種間共有的器官 他在動物頭骨中發現一條導管 把唾液送到口腔 他駁斥笛卡兒的想法 即只有人類有松果腺 並證明其並非靈魂所在 可說是神經科學的開端 在當時最值得注意的是他的方法 斯蒂諾從不讓古代文獻 如亞里斯多德的形上學 笛卡兒的演繹法 影響從經驗、實驗所得的證據 他的洞察力不被臆測或理性限制 因而深遠 斯蒂諾觀察到膽結石 如何在器官中形成 其形成的方式與他從金匠行業中 學到的造模原理相符 而此原理對各學科都有用 因為這是以固體的結構關係 了解固體的方法 後來,托斯卡納大公 還讓他解剖一條鯊魚 這條魚的牙齒與舌石相似 是存在於其他石頭內的奇怪石頭 在馬爾他及佛羅倫斯附近的山上可見 老普林尼,古羅馬自然科學家 說這些東西是從天上掉下來的 在黑暗時期 人們傳說它們是蛇的舌頭 被聖保羅變成石頭 斯蒂諾發現舌石其實是鯊魚的牙齒 反之亦然 因為它們有相同的構造生長徵象 他認為類似事物應有類似的生成方法 因而主張這些古代的牙齒 應該是從在水中的古代鯊魚而來 石頭在牙齒附近形成 並成為山脈 岩層為水的沉積物演變而來 應為水平展開 一層一層往上堆疊 從古至今從下往上 如果地層變形、傾斜 被斷層或峽谷切斷 這種變化是在岩層形成後才發生 這理論今天聽起來很簡單 但在其時是革命性的想法 他創立了地層學 並為地質學奠下根基 藉由發現兩個不同年代的 鯊魚牙齒有同一起源 及陳述現行的自然法則 在過去也通用 斯蒂諾為均變說撒下種子 其中心思想是過去是由現在 正在進行的作用形成 在 18 及 19 世紀 英國的均變說地質學家 詹姆斯·赫頓及查爾斯·萊爾 研究當代、速率非常慢的 侵蝕及沉積作用 瞭解到地球的年齡應該遠久於 聖經推測的 6000 年 他們的研究發現了岩石循環 與板塊構造學說結合 在二十世紀中期 給我們熔岩造地殼、震動 循環不息的地球理論 從一顆膽結石到 45 億年的星球 再往大處看 來看看生物學 假設你看到某地層有鯊魚牙齒 而另一種你從未見過的 生物化石卻埋在之下的地層 埋愈深的化石年代愈老,對嗎? 你現在有物種起源 及物種隨時間滅絕的證據 就拿均變說 說不定某種作用現在仍在進行 導致岩石產生變化,生命也有變化 這也可能解釋物種間的 相似性及差異 由解剖學家如斯蒂諾發現 有很多可以思索的地方 但查爾斯·達爾文有的是時間 在往加拉巴哥群島的漫長旅途中 閱讀其好友查爾斯·萊爾的書 《地質學原理》 此書可說是基於斯蒂諾的原理寫出的 有時候是巨人站在 好奇的小人物的肩膀上 尼古拉斯·斯蒂諾幫助進化論進化 為地質學破了土 並證明無偏見、經驗的觀察 可以穿越知識的疆界 深化我們的觀點 然而他最出色的貢獻 大概可說是他的格言 尋求真理 超越感官及我們目前的瞭解 如同追求未知之美 我們看見的很美 我們知道的更美 最美的顯然是我們不知道的