Grove Karl Gilbert: A Great Engine of Research

Preface and Acknowledgments

Preface and Acknowledgments Edwin McKee tells the story of the U.S. Geological Survey's Colorado River Expedition during which, over an evening campfire, the participants debated the question of who was America's greatest geologist. They selected Grove Karl Gilbert. The setting as much as the choice is appropriate. G. K. Gilbert was not only a superb scientist-the only man, for example, to be twice elected president of the Geological Society of America-but he was an explorer of international renown. He continues to be remembered as much for his contributions to the scientific discovery of the West as for the unexcelled monographs, experiments, and statements on method which helped make American geology supreme in the early twentieth century. What happened around that campfire in the gorge of the Grand Canyon has been repeated dozens of times, in field and office alike. Gilbert, it is affirmed, was a real man of genius in a discipline known more often for its adventurers than for its intellectuals. Within the earth sciences, his reputation flourishes: his name is constantly invoked in favor of a method, a theor~ or a precedent-setting investigation. His biography deserves to be modernized. More than fifty years ago, William Morris Davis published a memoir of Gilbert, the largest in the National Academy of Sciences' biographical series. Although Davis evidently felt that no future biography would be necessar )j he neglected to document his sources, and much of his research materials have eroded into oblivion. He also labored mightily to incorporate Gilbert into the theoretical superstructures of the age's geolog~ in particular, to place Gilbert into the context of Davisian geomorphology. Yet that endeavor, however sincere, introduced a terrific dissonance to the biograph~ and Davis' geology is now so dated that what he intended as flattery has become mere incongruity . It would be difficult to find two geologists more at odds in their perception of the earth. xii Preface and Acknowledgments Gilbert's reputation currently enjoys a renaissance of sorts. His mechanical analogies harmonize well with the increasing mathematicization of the earth sciences. His perspective on geologic time and on the analysis of geophysical and geomorphic systems resonates easily with the concept of a steady state and the appeal to systems theory. His papers on method are continually rediscovered and advertised. So thorough were some of his field studies and experimental researches that no one has attempted to reexamine them. The transformation of geologic thought which has antiquated the summae of his contemporaries has only revitalized appreciation for his own contributions. It is entirely appropriate that the Geological Society of America, which he helped found, should sponsor a symposium on his career as a means of celebrating the centennial of the u.S. Geological Survey-that "great engine of research," as Gilbert termed it-which he helped make into a world-famous institution. The essence of this transformation in geologic thinking has been in the appreciation and organization of geologic time. A general systems or cybernetic interpretation of earth systems has replaced the evolutionism which saturated the earth sciences of Gilbert's age. In the nineteenth centur~ as information about the earth accumulated, people became aware of an enormous past. History emerged, first, to causally unite this new information and, finall ~ to provide a convenient nonetiological framework by which to order it. It was natural enough that evolution should provide the fundamental patterns for organizing and interpreting earth history. In the twentieth centur~ however, as more information has poured in, that framework has collapsed. The forces of the present, especially the human agenc~ have become overwhelming. The scale of effective geologic time and space has been abbreviated; time's arrow has been given a feedback loop; the steady state of an open system has replaced the directionality of processes in a closed system acting under evolutionary or thermodynamic considerations. New chronometers have emerged, like the rhythms of paleomagnetic reversals , to replace the linear chronologies of the fossil record and radioactive decay. Where the nineteenth century would have looked at the growth and metabolism of an organism, the twentieth prefers its homeostasis. Where the nineteenth might have looked to the tree as an emblem of nature's organization, the twentieth would use a brain or a computer. The nineteenth century built up a complicated design of histor ~ both natural and human; the twentieth has largely broken that pattern. Yet Gilbert was less an anticipator of the modern assault on historicism, founded on such concepts as simultaneit~ complemen...