‘Had Lord Kelvin a right?’: John Perry, natural selection and the age of the Earth, 1894–1895
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The Marquis of Salisbury’s 1894 address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science sparked an important development in the debate on the age of the Earth. It led John Perry, a physicist, to produce the first mathematical rebuttal of Lord Kelvin’s calculations, which had since 1862 functioned as an argument against the theory of evolution by natural selection. Perry wished to affirm the independence of geology from physics, keeping each branch of science to its proper domain. With the support of his mathematical friends, Perry tried privately to induce Kelvin to modify his views. This effort failed, however, and the discussion became public in Nature . Perry supported his calculations with Heaviside’s new mathematical methods, and also with empirical data, though these were later undermined by Kelvin’s experiments. Perry was uncomfortable with his position as Kelvin’s critic, however, because he held his old teacher in great esteem. Although Kelvin never stopped believing that the Earth was too young for natural selection to have taken place, geologists and biologists responded very positively to Perry’s results, and no longer felt they had to justify their conclusions to physicists. The answer to ‘Had Lord Kelvin a right?’, ultimately depended on one’s scientific politics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".