Rather, Gould pinpoints a powerful pair of metaphors-time's arrow and time's cycle-by which humankind has always tried to grasp the concept of time. The development of the idea of deep time is by no means fieldwork, as the textbook myths would have us believe.
"Facts" are so embedded in a paradigm that they simply do not have the kind of independent probative power they were once thought to possess. Along with Kuhn and other philosophers and sociologists of science, Gould has recognized that mental constructs (metaphors, analogies, personal philosophies, imaginative leaps)-not empirical discoveries-are what bring about scientific advance. Kuhn argued, in part, that science is a social activity and that theories are intellectual constructions imposed on data, not demanded by them. Gould is deeply influenced by Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
He sets out to rectify the error and show the real sources of inspiration in the development of deep time which have not been properly understood. His intention is not simply to debunk the textbook legend, which has already been debunked by historians such as Martin J. Having elaborated this bit of scientific melodrama, Gould proceeds to demolish it by showing that the actualities of Hutton's and Lyell's work were the opposite of the textbook legend. So it was not until Charles Lyell published the Principles of Geology that geologists finally came to accept Hutton's basic message and banished miraculous intervention, catastrophes, and biblical deluges from their science. The Earth's strata, when carefully examined, betray "no vestige of a beginning-no prospect of an end." But Hutton was far ahead of his time. A century later, Hutton heroically broke with this biblical zealotry by arguing that geological evidence must rest upon a solid empirical foundation. Thomas Burnet was just such an archetypical religious spokesman. This legend as perpetuated by geology textbooks over the last century claims that geology remained in the service of the Mosaic story of creation so long as armchair geological theorists refused to place fieldwork ahead of scriptural authority. Standard textbook accounts of the achievements of these three figures have long provided what Gould describes as a "self-serving mythology." These flimsy "cardboard" accounts vaunt the superiority of empiricism and inductivism over the scientific nemesis of religious bigotry. To illustrate this, Gould picked three major figures in the history of geology, one traditional villain (Thomas Burnet) and two traditional heroes (James Hutton and Charles Lyell).
Gould ranks the development of the concept "deep time," which involved deliberately rejecting the biblical description of earth's past for nearly incomprehensible eons, with the revolutions associated with Copernicus and Darwin.
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