Catastrophies and earth history: The new uniformitarianism edited by W. A. Berggren and John A. Van Couvering. Princeton University Press, 1984. No. of pages: 464, Price: £60-10 (clothback), £13-90 (paperback). ISBN 0-691-08328-2, ISBN 0-691-08329-0 (pbk)
✍ Scribed by C. G. Adams
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2007
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 411 KB
- Volume
- 20
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0072-1050
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Price: €60.10 (clothback), €13.90 (paperback). ISBN 0491-08328-2, ISBN 0-691433294 (pbk).
Only occasionally is one priviIeged to receive an anthology of scientific papers in the shape of a symposium volume which is at once a delight to read and a pleasure to recommend. Cararnophes and Eurth History is such a volume. Edited by two distinguished scientists, its four sections comprise eighteen chapters by sixteen eminent authors. It is based on a symposium on Uniformitarianism and Catastrophes held at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in June 1977 and on a meeting on Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary Events held two months later at Lawrence, Kansas. Unfortunately, the book took seven years to produce, and it shows in those articles by contributors who have since revised their conclusions and in others which lack up-to-date references. These defects, and a few minor typological errors apart, the book is well produced and up to the high standard we expect of these particular editors.
Following a brief Foreword by Berggren and an almost equally short introduction by Van Cowering, the volume opens with three chapters under the general title of the 'Concept of a Catastrophe as a Natural Agent'.
Stephen Jay Gould leads off with a beautifully written, extremely interesting, highly provocative, and (in my view) rather misleading article aimed at vindicating punctuational change. He attacks uniformitarianism and gradualism in general, and LyeU and Darwin in particular, in an attempt to demonstrate that geological and biological processes, along with human affairs, are essentially catastrophic in nature. Lyell's principles of Geology he regards as having stifled later work by 'closing the minds of a profession towards reasonable empirical alternatives', while Darwin's gradualistic version of Natural Selection he sees, more correctly I fancy, as a rather restrictive dogma. He chooses the channelled scablands of eastern Washington (now thought to have been carved by successive violent releases of glacially ponded water) as illustrative of punctuational change in physical geology, the original single catastrophic flood hypothesis having been treated dismissively by uniformitarianminded geologists. But Lyell (Principlcr of Geotogy, 1830: 89) wrote: 'we may certainly anticipate great floods in future, and we may therefore presume that they have happened again and again in past times. The existence of enormous seas of fresh water, such as the North American lakes. . . is alone sufficient to assure us, that a time will come, however distant, when a deluge will lay waste to a considerable part of the North American continent. No hypothetical agency is required. He continues,