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characteristics of Nemesis, leaving Muller with an absence of evi-
dence and a huge backlog of stars to go.
Stephen Jay Gould did not care for the name Nemesis and took
Muller and his colleagues to task in an open letter in
Natural His-
tory:
"Nemesis is the personification of righteous anger. She attacks
the vain or the powerful, and she works for definite cause. . . . She
represents everything that our new view of mass extinction is strug-
gling to replace—predictable, deterministic causes afflicting those
who deserve it."
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He proposed the star be named Siva, after the
Hindu god of destruction, who, "Unlike Nemesis, . . . does not
attack specific targets for cause or for punishment. Instead, his
placid face records the absolute tranquillity and serenity of a neutral
process, directed toward no one."
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Siva's modus operandi com-
ported better with the view that Gould, Raup, and others were
developing in response to the Alvarez theory: Survival or extinction
are essentially matters of chance, of bad luck rather than bad genes.
A debate among serious scientists over which mythological name to
give to a star that has never been seen and whose existence is barely
even an educated guess, is one more curiosity stemming from the
Alvarez theory. But perhaps it is salutary: Seldom before have pale-
ontologists and astronomers had anything even to disagree about.
A third theory, proposed by Daniel Whitmire and Albert Jackson
of the University of Southwest Louisiana, appeared soon after.
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They suggested that the periodicity could be due to an undiscovered
tenth planet, Planet X, located beyond the orbit of Pluto. Regular
changes in the orbit of Planet X, about every 28 million years, could
have disturbed a cloud of comets beyond the orbit of Jupiter (not the
Oort cloud, which is much further out). The idea that there might be
a yet undetected planet was not completely ad hoc; it had come up
before as a way to explain the tiny discrepancies that remain be-
tween the calculated and observed orbits of certain planets. On the
other hand, calculations show that such a planet, unless it were well
outside the plane of orbit of the others, would probably be bright
enough to have been detected.
Astronomers may have taken the Raup-Sepkoski periodicity to
heart, but others did not. Soon after their initial paper appeared, con-
trary views began to arrive. This was not surprising, for as scientists
know better than most, if the only way to prove your point is by using
statistics, you are in trouble—especially if you are not a statistician. To
live by statistics is to run the risk of dying by statistics. As Disraeli said,
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics."
Antoni Hoffman, a paleontologist at Columbia University, wrote
the contrary article
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that drew the most attention, even the blessing
