Abstract
TEN years after the publication of the “Origin of Species,” Kelvin, then Sir William Thomson, threw a bomb into the camp of the apparently victorious evolutionists. “It was quite certain,” he said, “that a great mistake had been made-that British popular geology at the present time was in direct opposition to the principles of Natural Philosophy.” According to the great physicist, the rate of cooling of the earth and other physical ‘principles’ showed that our globe could not have been in a position to support life for longer than a period of from 50 to 300 million years. In his opinion, the drafts on the bank of time demanded by those who upheld uniformitarian geology and the evolution of plants and animals could not be honoured.
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MITCHELL, P. Logic and Law in Biology1. Nature 119, 748–750 (1927). https://doi.org/10.1038/119748a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/119748a0