Volume 36, Number 21 · January 18, 1990
Down on the Farm
By Stephen Jay Gould
From Foraging to Agriculture: The Levant at the End of the Ice Age
by Donald O. Henry
University of Pennsylvania Press, 277 pp., $38.95
At its founding, in 1807, the Geological Society of London vowed in its charter to eschew the older speculative tradition of grandiose 'theories of the earth' and to concentrate instead on the collection of stratigraphic facts in order to build a geological time scale, literally stone by stone. This strategy proved brilliantly successful: by mid-century, a worldwide sequence had been established as an alphabet and foundation for our planet's history. Nonetheless, this extreme position on the dialectic between fact and theory in science provoked a legitimate reaction from thoughtful scholars who recognized the ultimate sterility of a methodology without context and without aim beyond the noble, but unattainable, goal of piling pristine fact upon fact in the hope that generality would somehow mysteriously emerge at the end.
Review, 3144 words
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