Talk:James Hutton

This article is of interest to the following WikiProjects:

Please add the quality rating to the {{WikiProject banner shell}} template instead of this project banner. See WP:PIQA for details.

Biography: Science and Academia B‑class

	Biography portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography, a collaborative effort to create, develop and organize Wikipedia's articles about people. All interested editors are invited to join the project and contribute to the discussion. For instructions on how to use this banner, please refer to the documentation.BiographyWikipedia:WikiProject BiographyTemplate:WikiProject Biographybiography articles
B	This article has been rated as B-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
	This article is supported by the science and academia work group (assessed as Mid-importance).

Please add the quality rating to the {{WikiProject banner shell}} template instead of this project banner. See WP:PIQA for details.

Scotland B‑class High‑importance

	Scotland portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Scotland, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Scotland and Scotland-related topics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.ScotlandWikipedia:WikiProject ScotlandTemplate:WikiProject ScotlandScotland articles
B	This article has been rated as B-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
High	This article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale.

Please add the quality rating to the {{WikiProject banner shell}} template instead of this project banner. See WP:PIQA for details.

Geology B‑class Top‑importance

	Geology portal Talk:James Hutton is part of WikiProject Geology, an attempt at creating a standardized, informative, comprehensive and easy-to-use geology resource. If you would like to participate, you can choose to edit this article, or visit the project page for more information.GeologyWikipedia:WikiProject GeologyTemplate:WikiProject GeologyGeology articles
B	This article has been rated as B-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
Top	This article has been rated as Top-importance on the project's importance scale.

natural selection

From Paul Pearson, Cardiff University

The quotation from Hutton regarding the natural selection mechanism is from the 1794 'Investigation of the Principles of Knowledge', not the Theory of the Earth as stated. See my article on this in Nature Vol 425, p. 665 (2003) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.251.48.62 (talk) 11:46, 23 October 2003 (UTC)[reply]

This has been corrected, albeit much later, and the article has been cited in the article. — Athaenara ✉ 01:26, 6 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thank You Wikipedia

I am a first year student at secondary school, and I was given homework for History to find out about James Hutton. I could not find much information, so I tried on Wikipedia and found what I was looking for! Thank You Wikipedia, for being there and helping me.

Yours Sincerely,

Miss. R Robertson —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.129.83.160 (talk) 11:56, 4 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Glad we could be of at least some use to some wee soul! Thanks for saying so. --Mais oui! 11:41, 11 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Bad Religion quotes Hutton

Now I don't know for sure, but under the Cultural Reference heading the contributor claims that the band Bad Religion wasn't inspired by Hutton when they used his quote, "no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end" in a song. This seems impossible knowing that the lead vocalist for the band, Greg Graffin, has his undergraduate and master's degrees in geology. I recognized the quote immediately when my geology professor recited it in class ages ago having owned the Bad Religion cassette. So anyway- if I'm wrong then maybe a source could be cited for that tidbit.—Preceding unsigned comment added by Tommiepea (talk • contribs) 05:42, 5 January 2007

Thanks, I've removed that unsourced claim as you suggest. .. dave souza, talk 09:23, 5 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

That is extremely interesting. The source of the questionable assertion is interesting, too, but in a different way. From the article history:

04:44, 10 October 2004 (UTC) (over two years ago) the line, "The punk rock band Bad Religion quoted him saying "no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end" on their 1989 album No Control on the song of the same album title" was added at the bottom of the page by User:Mike Garcia (talk) (contribs).
04:46 (two minutes later) he came back to add to add, "but it wasn't inspired by him." (Four months ago, that user was blocked indefinitely (Block log) for offenses including vandalism and multiple sock puppets.)

19:01, 16 October 2005 (UTC) (over a year after that) another user added the "Cultural reference" section heading and moved it farther up the page without questioning the content.

I've added more information to the line, pluralised "Cultural references" as there may be more in future, and repositioned it between "See also" and "External links." Athænara ✉ 11:01, 5 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

They definitely were quoting Hutton. See their website, they reference that quote as "Hutton, 1795" in the lyrics for their son, No Control. http://www.badreligion.com/songmeta/248/ MBVECO (talk) 22:57, 17 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Unsourced essay

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, James Hutton presented a challenge to Neptunist theory. The theory is called Uniformitarianism because of Hutton's emphasis on the uniform working of natural forces through a long periods of geologic time. Hutton liked to take long walks through the Scottish countryside through rugged hills, alon the sparkling streamsm across the coastal plains, and down to the sea. Those observations suggested a dynamic Earth that changes day by day. Huttons concluded that the Earth is continually worn away by erosion, and that the aroded denris is transported by stream until the running waters of the rivers meet the still waters of the ocrean. Herem the energy of its transport is lost,m the eroded rock debris is deposited in layers of sediment that grow very thick and in time are converted into sedimentary rock.

The slow but continuous working of the process of erosion would ultimately result in the reduction of all land surfaces to sea level. That this has not happened was evidence of a second force at work in the Earth of uplift. Hutton believed that the dedimentary rock laters forminedin the oceans myst be gradyally elevated to form new land surfaces that replace those being worn away. Hutton found evidence for this part of his theory in the fact that the rocks of the highest mountains contain fossils that resemble living organisms found on ly in the sea. Thus, he concluded the rocks of the continents must have been formed under water.

Uniformitarian theory did not gain immediate success, but it did attract a group of adherents who strongly supported their position through the accumulation of empirical data, and this struggle helped swin the emphasis away from academic debate and focus attention on the value of observation evidence in support of a theoritical position. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.38.231.234 (talk) 04:55, 13 May 2007

Biography assessment rating comment

WikiProject Biography Assessment

The article may be improved by following the WikiProject Biography 11 easy steps to producing at least a B article. -- Yamara 16:48, 17 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Uniformitarianism

It should be noted that James Hutton never used the term uniformitarianism which is attributed to him in the first paragraph of the article. — Athaenara ✉ 01:26, 6 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Evolution

The section on evolution is important, and badly needs references. Macdonald-ross (talk) 11:49, 23 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

james-hutton.org

On December 9 2010 "Dave souza" (or someone calling himself that) changed all occurances of james-hutton.org.uk, the real James Hutton page, to james-hutton.org, a "healthy living" spam page (I have changed the links back - 28 occurances!). Link to the change. I report this here because this might be a problem for Wikipedia - and hope that somebody is knowledgeable about what to do, and get that done. This looks like an obvious "hijacking" of a real page on an whatever.org.uk or whatever.com.uk domain linked by Wikipedia by registering a whatever.org or whatever.com domain, change the Wikipedia links, and voila you get people redirected to your page. Why else would somebody register james-hutton.org for a page on "healthy living"? Well it might have been accidental...

I just checked the Spanish page on James Hutton. That page had been changed from james-hutton.org.uk to james-hutton.org on December 7 2011 by "Nachosan". [to the change.] (I haven't corrected them.) "Nachosan" made a lot of other changes on the page that day, but they all seem OK - like the changes "Dave souza" did (except for the deletion of ".org" - if he did it?). This is very peculiar indeed! Also the pages in Galician(Galego) and Korean link to james-hutton.org, those in Hebrew, Portugese, Russian and Finnish to james-hutton.org.uk, while the pages in the rest of the languages don't link to either of the two what I could see. The page in Galician was made March 23 2011 and was probably a translation of the then existing page in English. The Korean page at first didn't link to either page but it was extended (+3000 chars) by "Asfreeas" on December 13 2010 (four days after the edit of the English page) who put a single link to james-hutton.org at the end.

The links on the Spanish page looked like this when "Nachosan" started translating the English page on 20 September 2010: "cite web |url=http://www.james-hutton.org.uk/One/Biography/02.htm |title=Early Years |accessdate=2008-04-11 |publisher=James Hutton.org". Note that the link is correct, but the publisher is "James Hutton.org". On September 7 2010 "Nachosan" had corrected 12 links from "james-hutton.org" to "james-hutton.org.uk", without changing the publisher (which was still "James Hutton.org"). The original links were added by "Dave souza" on April 12 2008 and were to "james-hutton.org" with "James Hutton.org" as publisher. Obviously somewhere between April 2008 and September 2010 BFRS (the owners of the James Hutton site) changed domain from james-hutton.org to james-hutton.org.uk. This was noticed by "Nachosan" who corrected it. After that the Wikipedia pages have been changed back to james-hutton.org which today is a spam-page. By accident or by intent? I doubt that "Nachosan" or "Dave souza" would do it by intent, but perhaps by accident? Episcophagus (talk) 14:05, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]