Garniss Curtis (1919–2012): Dating Our Past

Around the time that On the Origin of Species was published, Lord Kelvin authoritatively stated that the Earth was between 20 and 400 million years old, a range still quoted today by many who deny evolution. As it was difficult to conceive of life’s diversity arising via natural selection and speciation in so short a span, the apparent young Earth formed a serious barrier to the plausibility of evolution’s capacity to generate the tree of life. T. H. Huxley famously attacked Kelvin, saying that his calculations appeared accurate due to their internal precision, but were based on faulty underlying assumptions about the nature of physics [1]. How right Huxley was. Garniss Curtis was born in San Rafael, California in 1919. This was just 15 years after Ernest Rutherford, famous for discovering the nucleus of the atom and the existence of the phenomenon of radioactive half-life, walked into a dimly lit room to announce a new date for the age of the earth: 1.3 billion years. Lord Kelvin, the venerable alpha of Earth-age estimates, was in attendance.