In their recent paper Knight and Harrison (2014) observe that substantive uniformitarianism, which they define as ‘‘the Principle of Uniformitarianism’’ or as ‘‘the ‘strong’ principle or doctrine developed by Hutton and later by Lyell’’ (Camandi, 1999), has been largely discredited by Gould (1965) and others. They note that the many previous criticisms of uniformitarianism have focused on the research approach rather than on the research object. They define the latter as ‘‘Earth’s physical systems,’’ and they claim that this, ‘‘. . .cannot be meaningfully investigated using a uniformitarian approach. . .’’