Stepping Stones, by Stephen Drury, Oxford University Press,
拢19.99/$35, ISBN 0198502710
AS MAMMOTH tasks go, writing the Earth鈥檚 history is one of the hairier ones.
It鈥檚 not just that there are 4.5 billion years to contend with鈥攜ou鈥檙e
almost bound to lay yourself open to sniping from friend and foe alike. In
Stepping Stones Stephen Drury has courageously stuck his neck out. With an
opening quote from Friedrich Engels, he declares the colour of his convictions.
And what is really interesting and useful is that Drury emphasises the first 4
billion years of terrestrial history鈥攐ne of the last great unknowns.
This period is at present an area of intense research activity. As I write,
Australian geologists are reporting fossil evidence that shoves back the origin
of eukaryotes鈥攖he complex cells that make up all multicellular organisms,
including us鈥攂y half a billion years to around 2.7 billion years ago
(快猫短视频,21 August, p11).
Only a week or so earlier, a new technique
was announced for dating the early post-depositional history of sedimentary
rocks such as sandstone, by measuring the ratios of isotopes in a mineral
suitably named xenotime. Since this technique can be used on Precambrian rocks
several billion years old that contain no fossils to help us to date them, it
has enormous potential, and may revolutionise our ability to unravel such
ancient history.
Advertisement
Scientific frontiers hard to keep up with, but Drury manages admirably. He
provides an intelligent and stimulating synthesis of all the fundamental
ingredients of our planet, bringing to it the professional touch of a
communicator who trained at the Open University, and is therefore versed in how
to put over complex topics clearly without fudging essential difficulties.
The ideas of Engels, and his friend and collaborator Karl Marx, emerge mostly
in the last chapter. Drury views the past 10 000 years of history through
Marxist glasses, bringing the economist鈥檚 theories of value and the development
of capital to bear on them.
After the academic bloodshed, palace revolutions and interdisciplinary
back-stabbing of the 1970s and 1980s, even geochemists (number crunchers) and
palaeontologists (stamp collectors) can now be found sharing the same geological
beds. Nowhere is this type of cooperation more necessary, and more fruitful,
than in the wide open spaces of the Precambrian.