Continental Drift: Not Even Wrong - Four Revolutions in the Earth Sciences - page 82

papers helped convince American geologists that the matter had been settled, and
there it stood for three decades.
But no authority or pair of authorities can prevent scientists from pursuing an
idea if they have a mind to, and Alexander Du Toit did. In 1937 he published Our
Wandering Continents , which he dedicated to Wegener. 15 Du Toit marshaled all
the impressive geologic evidence for drift, yet again geologists paid no attention.
The review of the topic in the American Journal of Science was barely a para-
graph long and devoid of analysis or opinion. The immediately preceding review,
of “Hackh's Chemical Dictionary ,” was twice as long, and the reviewer declared
the dictionary “uniformly well done.” 16 Some say that the worst insult one scient-
ist can hurl at another is to belittle a work as “not even wrong.” By stimulating
research, even a wrong idea can advance science. One that is “not even wrong” is
a dead end, a waste of time. To the magisters of American geology, the work of Du
Toit, whom Reginald Daly had called “the world's greatest field geologist,” was
not even wrong. 17
Schuchert and Willis never accepted continental drift. In 1944, at age eighty-
five, Willis had the strength of mind and conviction to write a paper titled “Contin-
ental Drift, ein Märchen [a Fairytale].” Against drift was “conclusive negative
evidence” that should cause it to “be placed in the discard, since further discussion
ofitmerelyincumberstheliteratureandbefogsthemindsoffellowstudents.”Wil-
lis aimed to banish continental drift not just from the list of working hypotheses
but from the very curriculum of geology, the theory whose name geologists dare
not speak. And for the most part, speak it they did not.
But Willis could not get by with mere insults and ridicule: he had to provide
reasons that would satisfy those who had not been studying the drift hypothesis for
“20 years,” as he claimed he had. To those who had followed Willis's work, his
first objection sounded familiar: “It is a well established principle of mechanics
that any floating object moving through air, water, or a viscous medium creates
behind it a suction.” 18 Therefore, he said, as South America drifted west, pieces
would have been suctioned off and left behind in the Atlantic, where we should
find them but do not. “Moreover, if such segments had been pulled off, the eastern
shoreline of South America should not so closely resemble the other side of the
supposedly original fracture. The close similarity of the two coasts presents us
with the choice: either the laws of dynamics were suspended to preserve unaltered
the rear outline of the drifting continent, or the continent did not drift.” 19 In oth-
er words, eighteen years after the AAPG symposium, the fit of the South Atlantic
continents remained too good to be true.