The most groundbreaking scientist you've never heard of - Addison Anderson
-
0:07 - 0:09Nicholas Steno is rarely heard of
-
0:09 - 0:11outside Intro to Geology,
-
0:11 - 0:14but anyone hoping to understand life on Earth
-
0:14 - 0:17should see how Steno expanded and connected
-
0:17 - 0:19those very concepts:
-
0:19 - 0:21Earth, life, and understanding.
-
0:21 - 0:25Born Niels Stensen in 1638 Denmark,
-
0:25 - 0:27son of a goldsmith,
-
0:27 - 0:28he was a sickly kid
-
0:28 - 0:31whose school chums died of plague.
-
0:31 - 0:33He survived to cut up corpses
-
0:33 - 0:34as an anatomist,
-
0:34 - 0:36studying organs shared across species.
-
0:36 - 0:38He found a duct in animal skulls
-
0:38 - 0:40that sends saliva to the mouth.
-
0:40 - 0:42He refuted Descartes' idea
-
0:42 - 0:44that only humans had a pineal gland,
-
0:44 - 0:46proving it wasn't the seat of the soul,
-
0:46 - 0:49arguably, the debut of neuroscience.
-
0:49 - 0:52Most remarkable for the time was his method.
-
0:52 - 0:54Steno never let ancient texts,
-
0:54 - 0:56Aristotelian metaphysics,
-
0:56 - 0:57or Cartesian deductions
-
0:57 - 1:01overrule empirical, experimental evidence.
-
1:01 - 1:05His vision, uncluttered by speculation or rationalization,
-
1:05 - 1:06went deep.
-
1:06 - 1:08Steno had seen how gall stones
-
1:08 - 1:10form in wet organs by accretion.
-
1:10 - 1:12They obeyed molding principles
-
1:12 - 1:14he knew from the goldsmith trade,
-
1:14 - 1:16rules useful across disciplines for understanding solids
-
1:16 - 1:19by their structural relationships.
-
1:19 - 1:20Later, the Grand Duke of Tuscany
-
1:20 - 1:22had him dissect a shark.
-
1:22 - 1:24Its teeth resembled tongue stones,
-
1:24 - 1:26odd rocks seen inside other rocks
-
1:26 - 1:29in Malta and the mountains near Florence.
-
1:29 - 1:31Pliny the Elder, old Roman naturalist,
-
1:31 - 1:34said these fell from the sky.
-
1:34 - 1:36In the Dark Ages, folks said they were snake tongues,
-
1:36 - 1:38petrified by Saint Paul.
-
1:38 - 1:41Stenos saw that tongue stones were shark teeth
-
1:41 - 1:42and vice versa,
-
1:42 - 1:45with the same signs of structural growth.
-
1:45 - 1:48Figuring similar things are made in similar ways,
-
1:48 - 1:49he argued the ancient teeth
-
1:49 - 1:51came from ancient sharks
-
1:51 - 1:54in waters that formed rock around the teeth
-
1:54 - 1:56and became mountains.
-
1:56 - 1:59Rock layers were once layers of watery sediment,
-
1:59 - 2:00which would lay out horizontally,
-
2:00 - 2:01one atop another,
-
2:01 - 2:03oldest up to newest.
-
2:03 - 2:05If layers were deformed,
-
2:05 - 2:05tilted,
-
2:05 - 2:06cut by a fault,
-
2:06 - 2:07or a canyon,
-
2:07 - 2:10that change came after the layer formed.
-
2:10 - 2:11Sounds simple today;
-
2:11 -back then, revolutionary.
-
Not SyncedHe'd invented stratigraphy
-
Not Syncedand laid geology's ground work.
-
Not SyncedBy finding one origin for shark teeth from two eras
-
Not Syncedby stating natural laws ruling the present
-
Not Syncedalso ruled the past,
-
Not SyncedSteno planted seeds for uniformitarianism,
-
Not Syncedthe idea that the past was shaped by processes
-
Not Syncedobservable today.
-
Not SyncedIn the 18th and 19th centuries,
-
Not SyncedEnglish uniformitarian geologists,
-
Not SyncedJames Hutton and Charles Lyell,
-
Not Syncedstudied current, very slow rates
-
Not Syncedof erosion and sentimentation
-
Not Syncedand realized the Earth had to be way older
-
Not Syncedthan the biblical guestimate, 6000 years.
-
Not SyncedOut of their work came the rock cycle,
-
Not Syncedwhich combined with plate tectonics
-
Not Syncedin the mid-twentieth century
-
Not Syncedto give us the great molten-crusting, quaking,
-
Not Syncedall-encircling theory of the Earth,
-
Not Syncedfrom a gall stone to a 4.5 billion year old planet.
-
Not SyncedNow think bigger,
-
Not Syncedtake it to biology.
-
Not SyncedSay you see shark teeth in one layer
-
Not Syncedand a fossil of an organism
-
Not Syncedyou've never seen under that.
-
Not SyncedThe deeper fossil's older, yes?
-
Not SyncedYou now have evidence
-
Not Syncedof the origin and extinction of species over time.
-
Not SyncedGet uniformitarian.
-
Not SyncedMaybe a process still active today
-
Not Syncedcaused changes not just in rocks, but in life.
-
Not SyncedIt might also explain similarities and differences
-
Not Syncedbetween species
-
Not Syncedfound by anatomists like Steno.
-
Not SyncedIt's a lot to ponder,
-
Not Syncedbut Charles Darwin had the time
-
Not Syncedon a long trip to the Galapagos,
-
Not Syncedreading a copy of his friend
-
Not SyncedCharles Lyell's "Principles of Geology,"
-
Not Syncedwhich Steno sort of founded.
-
Not SyncedSometimes giants stand on the shoulders
-
Not Syncedof curious little people.
-
Not SyncedNicholas Steno helped evolve evolution,
-
Not Syncedbroke ground for geology,
-
Not Syncedand showed how unbiased, empirical observation
-
Not Syncedcan cut across intellectual borders
-
Not Syncedto deepen our perspective.
-
Not SyncedHis finest accomplishment, though,
-
Not Syncedmay be his maxim,
-
Not Syncedcasting the search for truth
-
Not Syncedbeyond our senses and our current understanding
-
Not Syncedas the pursuit of the beauty
-
Not Syncedof the as-yet unknown.
-
Not SyncedBeautiful is what we see,
-
Not Syncedmore beautiful is what we know,
-
Not Syncedmost beautiful, by far, is what we don't.
- Title:
- The most groundbreaking scientist you've never heard of - Addison Anderson
- Speaker:
- Addison Anderson
- Description:
-
View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/the-most-groundbreaking-scientist-you-ve-never-heard-of-addison-anderson
Seventeenth-century Danish geologist Nicolas Steno earned his chops at a young age, studying cadavers and drawing anatomic connections between species. Steno made outsized contributions to the field of geology, influencing Charles Lyell, James Hutton and Charles Darwin. Addison Anderson recounts Steno's little-known legacy and lauds his insistence on empiricism over blind theory.
Lesson by Addison Anderson, animation by Anton Bogaty.
- Video Language:
- English
- Team:
- closed TED
- Project:
- TED-Ed
- Duration:
- 04:33
TED edited English subtitles for The most groundbreaking scientist you've never heard of | ||
Jessica Ruby approved English subtitles for The most groundbreaking scientist you've never heard of | ||
Jessica Ruby accepted English subtitles for The most groundbreaking scientist you've never heard of | ||
Jessica Ruby edited English subtitles for The most groundbreaking scientist you've never heard of | ||
Jessica Ruby edited English subtitles for The most groundbreaking scientist you've never heard of | ||
Andrea McDonough edited English subtitles for The most groundbreaking scientist you've never heard of | ||
Andrea McDonough edited English subtitles for The most groundbreaking scientist you've never heard of |