Geologists Unite Against Heresy - Four Revolutions in the Earth Sciences - page 76

two continents. As to the mechanism that caused the uptrusions, that was attribut-
able to something called the “energy of the dynamic Caribbean.”
But what takes a few sentences to describe hides a lengthy process of back-and-
forth letter writing and negotiation. Finally, in December 1932, the Bulletin of the
Geological Society of America published, back to back, Schuchert's “Gondwana
Land Bridges” and Willis's “Isthmian Links,” the two together taking up seventy-
seven pages. 19
If anything were needed to demonstrate that as of the early 1930s, geology
was indeed a science bereft of a theory, it is the Schuchert-Willis letters. Reading
the two septuagenarians raising a land bridge here, widening or shrinking another
there, and finally getting rid of each “uptruded” bridge just when its work was
done, it is impossible not to think of the phrase “Playing God with the planet.” As
Newman sums up: “This is neither science nor scholarship.” 20
Looking at Schuchert's paleographic maps today, with their imaginary serpent-
ine land bridges stretching here and there, one cannot help thinking of the sketches
of nonexistent Martian canals or the maps of alien lands in a science-fiction novel.
The pair of papers by the distinguished magisters of geology, published in the
leading American journal and expressed with the utmost assurance, “effectively
marked the end of active debate over continental drift in the United States,” wrote
Oreskes. 21 The papers influenced a generation of geologists, yet land bridges were
a myth, and as Newman notes, Willis's argument was “meaningless pseudo-logic.”
But “like a Papal encyclical, it was the imprimatur, not the argument, that carried
weight.” 22