Science Quote by John G. D. Clark

Clark is pointing to a quiet revolution: time got big, and everything else had to change around it. The line is almost modest in its phrasing, but its payload is destabilizing. By saying we have "come...to appreciate" evolution over "immense periods", he frames modern knowledge not as a single discovery but as a cultural recalibration, a slow training of imagination. This is less about fossils or galaxies than about humility: the universe is not arranged for our convenience, and history is not a human-sized story.

The intent reads like a bridge between disciplines. Clark (best known as an archaeologist and prehistorian) is likely situating human culture inside the same deep-time arc that geology and biology had already mapped. "The world and indeed the very universe" telescopes from Earth to cosmos, a rhetorical widening that mirrors the intellectual shift he describes: once you accept that planets, species, and societies are products of process, not design, you inherit a new kind of explanation. Origins stop being neat, moral tales and become provisional reconstructions.

The subtext is also a critique of older certainty. "Recent centuries" nods to the scientific upheavals from Enlightenment geology through Darwin and modern cosmology, implying that earlier worldviews weren’t merely wrong; they were scaled to human comfort. Deep time is the anti-myth: it doesn’t flatter us, but it does make room for real causality. Clark’s sentence works because it turns a technical insight into a cultural diagnosis: modernity is, in part, the ability to think in spans that dwarf a lifetime, a nation, even a species.