Geologists Unite Against Heresy - Four Revolutions in the Earth Sciences - page 72

logists had retreated from their oftprofessed allegiance to Chamberlin's “multiple
working hypotheses.”
Safe with the Law of Uniformity
The volume comprised 226 pages (not including the index). 6 Van der Gracht's in-
troductionaccountedforseventy-fivepagesandhissummarytwenty-nine.Wegen-
er did not attend the meeting but did have a chapter in the topic. It ran a bit over
five pages, roughly half on the evidence from glacial deposits and the other half on
the unpersuasive prospect of testing drift using changes in longitude. One accused
of a crime would not have wanted Alfred Wegener as his defense attorney. John
Joly, who also stayed home, could muster barely a page of limp support, saying
that “continental movement is not improbable.”
After van der Gracht's introduction, Bailey Willis began his chapter by pro-
claiming that he had considered the theory of continental drift with “avowed im-
partiality.” On that basis, he had found “geophysical, geological, and paleontolo-
gic reasoning” to show that the theory “should be rejected.” Rejection was neces-
sary because the theory “sprang from a similarity of form (coast lines of Africa
and South America) which . . . drift would have destroyed . . . by faulting.” 7 The
“similarity of outline” meant to Willis that “there . . . can have been no movement
of one continent away from the other.” If the two continents were once joined, he
thus argued, the forces required to tear them apart would have destroyed the fit.
Willis turned the jigsawpuzzle fit of Africa and South America inside out, claim-
ing that the match was too good to be true. Willis's penultimate paragraph reads
in part: “The fields of related sciences have been searched [by Wegener] for ar-
guments that would lend color to the adopted theory, whereas facts and principles
opposed to it have been ignored. Thus the topic leaves the impression that it has
been written by an advocate rather than by an impartial investigator” (82).
Rollin T. Chamberlin titled his chapter “Some Objections to Wegener's The-
ory.” 8 He wrote as an advocate, presenting only arguments against drift and blam-
ing the lack of balance and his admitted “categorical” denial as a necessity caused
by “Wegener's own dogmatism.” Attributing the question to “other groups of the
profession,” he asked: “Can we call geology a science when there exists such dif-
ference of opinion on fundamental matters as to make it possible for such a theory
as this to run wild?” 9
At the end of a long list of objections to drift, Rollin Chamberlin got to the real
reasons: