online conversation with author, Alan Cutler

Lisa Kimball lisa at groupjazz.com
Thu Jun 5 18:27:44 PDT 2003


I thought some of the open space community might be interested in this
online event.  Lots of juicy food for thought about emergence, systems, and
other fascinating things!
Join Alan Cutler, author of The Seashell on the Mountaintop, in an online
Chautauqua session starting June 15th at
http://groupjazz.com/chautauqua/current.html

Registration is free.

In the bestselling tradition of The Map that Changed the World and Longitude
comes the tale of a seventeenth-century
scientist-turned-priest who forever changed our uderstanding
of the Earth and created a new field of science.

It was an ancient puzzle that stymied history’s greatest minds: How did the
fossils of seashells find their way far inland, sometimes high up into the
mountains? Fossils only made sense in a world old enough to form them, and
in the seventeenth century, few people could imagine such a thing. Texts no
less authoritative than the Old Testament laid out very clearly the
timescale of Earth’s past; in fact one Anglican archbishop went so far as to
calculate the exact date of Creation
October 23, 4004, B.C.

A revolution was in the making, however, and it was started by the brilliant
and enigmatic Nicholas Steno, the man whom
Stephen Jay Gould called “the founder of geology.” Steno
explored beyond the pages of the Bible, looking directly at the clues left
in the layers of the Earth. With his groundbreaking answer to the fossil
question, Steno would not only confound the religious and scientific
thinking of his own time, he would set the stage for the modern science that
came after him. He would open the door to the concept of “deep time,” which
imagined a world with a history of millions or billions of years. And at the
very moment his expansive new ideas began to unravel the Bible’s
authoritative claim as to the age of the Earth, Steno
would enter the priesthood and rise to become a bishop,
ultimately becoming venerated as a saint and beatified by the Catholic
Church in 1988.

Combining a thrilling scientific investigation with world-altering history
and the portrait of an extraordinary genius, The Seashell on the Mountaintop
gives us new insight into the very old planet on which we live, revealing
how we learned to read the story told to us by the Earth itself, written in
rock and stone.

About the Author
Alan Cutler has a Ph.D. in geology and is a writer affiliated with the
Smithsonian Institution. Dr. Cutler was a contributing editor to The Forces
of Change: A New View of Nature, and his articles have appeared in The
Washington Post and The Sciences, among other publications. He lives in
Gaithersburg, Maryland.

Lisa Kimball
Group Jazz,Suite 440
5335 Wisconsin Ave.NW
Washington,DC 20015
Phone:+1 202.686.4848
Fax:+1 202.966.3772
http://www.groupjazz.com
lisa at groupjazz.com

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