Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
• All catastrophism became equated with biblical catastrophism,
to geologists an outmoded and shunned belief espoused only by
scientific heretics.
• We are always attracted by a hero, and Lyell's writings had
turned Hutton into the founder of geology. By espousing
uniformitarianism, one stood tall beside the founding fathers.
• As uniformitarianism became dogma, it was re-espoused in
each new geology textbook from Lyell to the present. Each
generation of geologists learned uniformitarianism at its parent's
knee, so to speak. Uniformitarianism had been around for so long
that it never occurred to anyone to question it. [An exception who
made public his doubts in his first scientific paper, written at age
25, is Stephen Jay Gould.
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]
• To call upon catastrophe to solve difficult problems diminishes
the skills of generations of intelligent, hardworking geologists. It is
too easy—a cop-out.
• Finally, only after World War II did the most dramatic evidence
opposing uniformitarianism—the scarred and magnetized seafloor,
which supported the notion of drifting continents (or moving
plates], and the record of impact on other bodies in the solar
system—become known.
We can now understand how the Alvarez theory ran into trouble
on two grounds. First, it was catastrophic and contradicted the vener-
able doctrine of uniformitarianism. Second (and worse], it appealed
to an extraterrestrial process, seeming to belittle the hard-won scien-
tific achievements of generations of earthward-directed geologists.
Add to these two reasons the natural resistance met by new theories
and we have gone a long way toward understanding why geologists
were far from delighted with the new Alvarez theory.
AN
EXERCISE
IN
NEWSPEAK
Though modern geologists rejected a strict interpretation of Lyell's
uniformity of state, by the 1950s most of those in North America had
come to believe that at least the outer appearance of the earth, with
its continents and ocean basins, had not changed dramatically—cer-
tainly continents had not drifted. The notion that seafloors spread out
to plunge beneath continents, that the ocean basins are geologically
