Architects of Eternity by Richard Corfield, Headline, £18.99, ISBN
0747271798
IF I was editor of FHM, GQ or Esquire and needed a palaeontology
correspondent, I’d try to get Richard Corfield. In Architects of Eternity, this
isotope geochemist with attitude unveils palaeontology—and much more
besides—from the viewpoint of the chemist, physicist and biologist. It’s
this diverse group who practise what Corfield calls the “new” science of
fossils, armed with mass spectrometers and other big bits of kit with flashing
lights. It’s palaeo for robot warriors, a turbocharged survey of how fossils
have brought home to us the true meaning of one of humanity’s greatest
conceptual achievements—deep time, the billions of years our planet has
existed, and over which life has evolved. It’s analagous to deep space, but
refers to the vast stretch of time that embraces the geological past.
Corfield tells his story through its characters—the architects of deep
time—and their work. We first meet most of them in short, fictionalised
vignettes. Stephen Jay Gould, in the early 1970s, recovers in a Boston hospital
from a squash injury to his eye and works through the implications of “Punk Eek”
(punctuated equilibrium) behind swathes of bandages. Birmingham University’s
first geology professor, Charles Lapworth—”the Che Guevara of the Lower
Palaeozoic” who defined the Ordovician—nervously anticipates a row at the
Geological Society over his graptolites. Corfield calls these “the M-Series
BMWs of the Lower Palaeozoic”. If you know what an M-series BMW is, but haven’t
heard of graptolites, this book is just the thing to broaden your outlook.
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Deep time is having a good press right now—the cladist systematics
approach (Henry Gee’s In Search of Deep Time), and geochronology (Cherry Lewis’s
The Dating Game), for example. As it happens, Corfield’s book—his
first—stands up well. His canvas is wider, covering no less than the whole
incredible diversity of modern geoscience, where the most exciting new
developments are often interdisciplinary.
He takes in everything that has energised geoscience for more than a hundred
years: mass extinctions, plate tectonics, asteroid impacts, the Cambrian
explosion and fossil DNA. With each new revelation has come a new wave of
specialists, sweeping into the geo gene pool like waves of migrants arriving at
Ellis Island en route to a new land.
This is the way geoscience has always been, but Corfield in his enthusiasm
makes it sound like something new. Geoscience has always recruited new
techniques and put them to work on the study of Earth. But the notion of deep
time is opening it all up in an unprecedented way. Geological perspectives are
unfolding in subjects previously only about the here and now. Even the human
genome reveals life’s multibillion-year history, rather than just the
constituents of humans. The revelations of deep time make palaeontologists of us
all.
This is a huge range of material for a shortish book to cover, and Corfield’s
delivery of the data is fast, not to say breathless. This can create problems.
His own field, isotope geochemistry, is a difficult subject and getting your
head round it at the speed Corfield demands will not be easy for beginners.
There’s not much sugar coating on the pill, either. No autobiography à
la Richard Fortey, none of the musings about Renaissance architecture that Gould
is wont to toss in. His fictionalised snippets of scientists’ lives are widely
spaced. The rest is solid science, and some may find it a little
unremitting.
And there’s a serious mismatch between the book’s racy content and its
grandiloquent title. Don’t let it put you off. To bring the “new” and the “old”
science of fossils so alive, when this largely means talking about isotopes,
amino acids, foraminifera and graptolites instead of dinosaurs, is no mean feat.
Academic eyebrows will shoot skywards at the glib, cavalier teleology of his
science history. But Corfield will not care much about this, or when others
sneer at the Latin names he sometimes gets slightly wrong.
Quite the reverse: he stamps gleefully on the corns of the grey flannel
brigade. I could feel myself egging him on.