Times of life

The duration of individual organism is collapsed within the instantaneous present of the event it represents, the time occupied by a genealogical sequence or lineage of such events, is rendered lifeless it is but a particular stretch of eternity. In Kantian cosmology, as in Lamarckian transformism, time was immanent in the evolutionary process; in Darwinian descent with modification it was wholly extraneous to it. The Darwinian genealogical sequence, being a concatenation of non-recurrent entities and events, is suspended in the first kind of time; the second kind is intrinsic to the evolutionary movement conceived as a continuous unfolding or directed flow. Wiener adopts his view of the evolution of life from Darwin rather than Spencer and regards Darwinian descent with modification as a movement in Bergsonian irreversible time. By adding officially another 160,000 years to the chronology of the earth, Buffon introduces the kind of time-scale necessary to render even remotely plausible any theory of the transmutation of species.