Fads in Science

Checking with Chris Lott yesterday, I hoped to be reminded where I got the idea for spread-eagling the geological time scale for the last 4.8 million years (see previous blog). He suggested that it came from Bill Bryson’s 2003 book, “A Brief History of Nearly Everything.” Last night, and again this morning, I tore through that book, and failed to find the passage that we both suspected was somewhere in those 500 pages. No luck yet.

Nevertheless, poring through this one book reminded me of the fickleness or the faddishness of the bases for what we think we know about the way our planet has developed. Two examples:

1. After Hutton, Lyell and Darwin, gradualism (“uniformitarianism”) so thoroughly dominated natural philosophy that the previously dominant paradigm (“catastrophism”) was driven out of vogue. Noah’s Flood of the Bible was the bathwater. Several babies went out with the bathwater. In the early 20^th century, geologists were reluctant to accept evidence for catastrophic flooding in NW U.S. states, associated with repeated outbreaks of Lake Missoula. And in the late 20^th century (~1980) paleontologists resisted accepting evidence for the destructive impact of a comet or asteroid near the Yucatan Peninsula and extinction of 70 percent of living species, including dinosaurs. Finally, the pendulum has swung to admit that catastrophes do explain some of Earth’s evolution.
2. Upon the voyage of HMS Challenger in the 1870s, oceanography was indelibly stamped with the identity of being ship-borne. Exclusively. So discredited were the earlier practices of naturalists’ noting what washed up on the beach that publishing any but shipboard observations went completely out of favor. People failed over and over to notice that shallow-water marine organisms were often overlooked by oceanographers. Over 50 years passed, during which nobody officially “noticed” (published) the fact that the blue mussel really does live widely along Arctic shores. Finally, beachcombing has returned to favor.