Adam Sedgwick Quotes
Considered as a mere question of physics, (and keeping all moral considerations entirely out of sight,) the appearance of man is a geological phenomenon of vast importance, indirectly modifying the whole surface of the earth, breaking in upon any supposition of zoological continuity, and utterly unaccounted for by what we have any right to call the laws of nature.
Sedgwick, Adam. "Address to the Geological Society, Delivered on the Evening of the 18th of February 1831." Proceedings of the Geological Society of London, vol. 1, 1831, p. 305.
The religious theology of the Church of England had accepted the fact based on Newton’s work, that the heavenly bodies followed a set of scientific laws that were themselves created by God. However, the Church could not accept the same principle when it came to the different species of humans and lower order animals. Each species they believe was created with all its characteristics by God directly and species could not change, develop, regress, go extinct unless God specifically ordained that. It was this inconsistency that Darwin was afraid would produce religious attacks on him and his notions of natural selection while astronomy and physics was treated very different theologically. Darwin delayed publishing his findings for 25 years hoping to find a religious atmosphere that would treat biology much as physics and astronomy. It didn’t come and finally he published and took the heat, which actually was not very great. With the exception of some religious fundamentalists, most other elements of society welcomed and supported Darwin’s ideas which today we realize were among the most important ever put forth in the world of science.
Adam Sedgwick was a British geologist and priest, one of the founders of modern geology. He proposed the Cambrian and Devonian period of the geological timescale. Based on work which he did on Welsh rock strata, he proposed the Cambrian period in 1835, in a joint publication in which Roderick Murchison also proposed the Silurian period. Later in 1840, to resolve what later became known as the Great Devonian Controversy about rocks near the boundary between the Silurian and Carboniferous periods, he and Murchison proposed the Devonian period.
