It's the Earth's "birthday!" Today, October 23, is the anniversary of the 4004, BCE creation of the cosmos, according to Archbishop James Ussher, Primate of All Ireland and Archbishop of Armagh. Ussher is famous for having made a pre-geology attempt to date our planet using a literal interpretation of Biblical scripture and a carefull tallying of "begats." Though a scholarly and noble attempt given the intellectual context of his day, Ussher's ideas were soon supplanted with the discovery of deep time by geological studies, starting ~100 years later with another James, James Hutton. The accepted age of the Earth was pushed back further and further by subsequent geological work, and our currently accepted age for the planet (and the Solar System) is approximately 4.6 billion years. Despite these insights, there are a substantial number of "Young Earth" creationists who stick to Ussher's number, or a similarly itty-bitty age derived from a Holy Book of their choosing. This bizarre contention puts them in the awkward position of having to deny the fossil record, the decay of radioactive isotopes, the expansion of the universe, and (of course!) the evolution of species by mechanisms other than Special Creation by a diety. Because Ussher was a scholar and a thinker as well as a religious man, my suspicion is that if he were alive today, he would reject the close-minded anti-science that so many creationists voice.

I love the fact that Ussher's title was "Primate," considering that the main issue creationists have with evolution is that they don't want to be descended from non-humans. The word primate comes from the Latin for "first" (as in "primary") and reflects Ussher's position at the top of the Church of Ireland, and Linnaeus' view that the primates were "first" among the mammals, an anthropocentric bias that persists in uncountable ways today. The truth of the matter is that humans are primates, and so are baboons, lemurs, gorillas, and yes, even chimpanzees.

Ussher was indeed a primate -- just like the rest of us. Happy birthday!

Labels: geologic time, history, words