James Hutton

Yeah.

Right, kicking off the earthy theme, uh, you were at the James Hutton Institute in Aberdeen-

Mm

... to visit the soil archive.

We can still get that information from the dry samples, but nothing to do with the biology really.

My name's Colin Campbell.

I'm the chief executive of the James Hutton Institute.

One of the things I love in this map archive is this collection of map sheets, which, um, when you look at them, I'll just pull one out for you.

So it depends on which book you read, who discovered it.

But it's James Hutton.

What time was this?

Actually,

1800 or something.

Yeah, 1800.

Fun fact, actually, James Hutton is buried in very famous graveyards in Edinburgh in Scotland, which I visited this summer.

Yeah.

I would urge your readers to consider donating to the appeal or sharing information about it.

To find out more or donate, visit shelterbox.org. yours etc alice jefferson head of emergency response and preparedness shelter box stance on statues sir so the un thinks that to atone for slavery britain should erect more statues honoring people selected on account of their ethnicity frankly this is racism far better to put up statues of some of the greatest thinkers of all time not a few of whom were british Men such as Sir Isaac Newton, Adam Smith, James Hutton, James Clerk Maxwell, Charles Darwin, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Their achievements stand as an inspiration to people of every race and religion.

Yours, etc.

The science of geology started right here.

in the late 1700s with James Hutton.

That's no coincidence.

Arthur's Seat, the crags, the rocks have shaped this city.

By finding one origin for shark teeth from two eras, by stating natural laws ruling the present also ruled the past, Steno planted seeds for uniformitarianism, the idea that the past was shaped by processes observable today.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, English uniformitarian geologists James Hutton and Charles Lyell studied current very slow rates of erosion and sedimentation and realized the Earth had to be way older than the biblical guesstimate, six thousand years.

Out of their work came the rock cycle, which combined with plate tectonics in the mid-twentieth century to give us the great molten, crusting, quaking, all-encircl-

So good, so good, so good.

Before Lovelock and Margulis, other thinkers throughout history had glimpsed and sensed similar ideas.

In the 18th century, the geologist James Hutton argued that geological and biological processes were deeply interlinked and dependent on one another.

The naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt, travelling through continents, recognised that organisms and climate co-evolved together.

Even the astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler in the 1600s wrote about Earth as a living being, moved by intuition and observation.

So one thing that... talking about going off little curiosity paths.

So I also volunteer at Inverleith Gallery at the Botanics, and they have an exhibition called Earth Matters, which is celebrating the 300th anniversary of James Hutton.

And I'd never heard of him before, but he was a geologist, a philosopher, a farmer, a doctor, and basically through studying rock formations, in one place it was Salisbury Crag, he sort of realised that the Earth matters, wasn't 6,000 years ago, as everyone believed in the Bible, etc.

But it was actually billions of years.

Like, I just love again, that's a WTF to me.

It's like a huge one.

And like what you heard, I've never heard of James Hutton before.

And he's like, no, and like, it's amazing.