Evolution of the Earth / Эволюция Земли

In the tradition of liberal education, we believe that introductions to sciences should be primarily conceptual rather than informational. Students deserve introductions that reveal the logical framework of a discipline, show relations of that discipline to the totality of man's knowledge, and give them some idea of what it is like to be a participant in the discipline. At the same time, there should be depth and rigor that challenge the mind. Our experience indicates that students are stimulated greatly by constant exposure to scientific controversies, occasional spicy personal feuds or an amusing faux pas. The student also needs to become a partner in the endless process of hypothesis testing, which is what we believe science is all about. In this book, we have tried to use these approaches.

A welcome trend in education is to emphasize "How do we know?" more than the past didactic tradition of "What do we know?" (or think we know). We have presented here a complex body of knowledge but at the same time have stressed what assumptions are made by earth historians, what kinds of evidence and tools for gathering evidence are available, and what processes of reasoning and limitations of hypotheses are involved in reconstructing and interpreting the past. We think it important to emphasize that which is more or less unique about geology as an intellectual discipline. To us it is its historical nature that sets geology and certain other sciences apart from the generally more familiar, nonhistorical ones. We deliberately have tried to draw out and to illustrate this uniqueness. So-called integrated and survey-type introductory geology treatments inevitably neglect earth history, which is deplorable if it is truly the most distinctive aspect of the science. Initial encounters with the sciences involve major shifts of scales, both spatial and temporal, as well as language shifts. For the average person, these commonly are very difficult. For non-science-oriented people, apathy and even antagonism may result from an early inability to grasp such shifts. In geology, the initial adjustment for the layman undoubtedly is best made in the field where the raw data lie. Ideally, most introductory geology should be taught in the field nearly 100 per cent of the time. For the most part, however, this heuristic ideal is not practical, so procedures must be used to lend synthetically some reality and to induce some student involvement in the subject. For earth history, we have had success by beginning with discussion of the more familiar geologic processes that have affected man most directly in historic times. Gradually the discussion shifts into truly geologic frames of reference. <...>