(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

It has been awhile since I have made the regular readers of this blog suffer through a long multipart series exploring a particular question. But my post on the interconnectedness of scientific theories spurred me to thinking about finding a good example, and the age of the Earth popped into my head as almost perfect. This series will be interspersed with posts on other topics.

The process by which science came to be interconnected can be described as beginning with a transition from ‘early modern science’ (which I have chosen to date as beginning with Galileo around 1600 CE) to ‘modern science’, that started around 1800 as new disciplines like geology, chemistry, and biology started to become mature and independent, developing their own theories and research protocols. But starting around 1900 a new trend emerged, which I will call ‘late modern science’, in which these somewhat independently developing fields began, as they grew, to encroach on each other’s territories, and the need to seek consistency among them became apparent. After some initial crises of incompatibility, by around 1930 the theories had started to mesh reasonably well.
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