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Hutton's Unconformity at Jedburgh. Above: John Clerk of Eldin's 1787 illustration. Below: 2003 photograph. Uniformitarianism, also known as the Doctrine of Uniformity or the Uniformitarian Principle, [1] is the assumption that the same natural laws and processes that operate in our present-day scientific observations have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the ...
In historical linguistics, the uniformitarian principle is the assumption that processes of language change that can be observed today also operated in the past. Peter Trudgill calls the uniformitarian principle "one of the fundamental bases of modern historical linguistics," which he characterizes, other things being equal, as the principle "that knowledge of processes that operated in the ...
Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time is a 1987 history of geology by the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, in which the author offers a historical account of the conceptualization of Deep Time and uniformitarianism using the works of the English theologian Thomas Burnet, and the Scottish geologists James Hutton and Charles Lyell.
The principle of Uniformitarianism states that the geologic processes observed in operation that modify the Earth's crust at present have worked in much the same way over geologic time. [2] A fundamental principle of geology advanced by the 18th century Scottish physician and geologist James Hutton, is that "the present is the key to the past ...
This idea, uniformitarianism, was used by Charles Lyell in his work, and Lyell's textbook was an important influence on Charles Darwin. The work was first published in 1788 [ 4 ] by the Royal Society of Edinburgh , and later in 1795 as two book volumes.
Whewell coined, among other terms, scientist, [2] physicist, linguistics, consilience, catastrophism, uniformitarianism, and astigmatism; [3] he suggested to Michael Faraday the terms electrode, ion, dielectric, anode, and cathode. [4] [5] Whewell died in Cambridge in 1866 as a result of a fall from his horse.
The scientific basis of this is the principle of uniformitarianism, which states that the sediments within ancient sedimentary rocks were deposited in the same way as sediments which are being deposited at the Earth's surface today. [citation needed]
Strict uniformitarianism may often be a guarantee against pseudo-scientific phantasies and loose conjectures, but it makes one easily forget that the principle of uniformity is not a law, not a rule established after comparison of facts, but a methodological principle, preceding the observation of facts ....