From Rob Brown
plopbob@classic.msn.com
I was baffled to read
(Editorial
and “What really killed the dinosaurs”, 16 August, p 22)
that the cosmic impact theory of species extinction was invented
in the 1980s by Luis Alvarez in the US. I cannot be the only New Scientist
reader who has a dog-eared copy of Immanuel Velikovsky’s books Worlds in
Collision (1950) and Earth in Upheaval (1956) on their shelf. Velikovsky
proposed that a series of catastrophic cosmic encounters and near misses had
shaped the geological and historical development of the Earth. Velikovsky
himself was gracious enough to acknowledge his debt to Georges Cuvier, the
French catastrophist.
The history of cosmic collision theory is fascinating. As a Frenchman, Cuvier
lived in a revolutionary society. Catastrophism seemed to legitimise political
revolution by showing that the natural world was also shaped by revolutionary,
catastrophic events.
All such “revolutionism” was seen as a major political threat by the British
Establishment. “Gradualism”, the changing of the world (for the better) by
infinitely small adjustments over infinitely extended periods of time, was laid
down as the principle underlying the British constitution by Edmund Burke, one
of the most reactionary opponents of the French Revolution.
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British geologists projected similar political values on nature. James Hutton
and Charles Lyell countered catastrophism by proposing that the globe was shaped
by familiar forces acting slowly over extremely long periods. Darwin later did
the same for the living world.
With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism, the cosmic
collision theory should now be politically neutral. Unfortunately for
catastrophists, gradualism still has a crucial role in that dominant social
mythos underpinned by Darwinism, adherence to which seems to be the equivalent
of the McCarthy loyalty oath for scientists.
