Evidence, Standing, and Style of Presentation

More on Catastrophism. As a one-time science fiction writer—where the urge is sometimes great to produce a clean slate for a futuristic projections—the subject has always interested me. I entered this door when I discovered that geologists had varying explanations for ice ages. One of the first catastrophic figures I encountered was an obscure contemporary engineer named Chan Thomas. I learned of his theory in a news story in the Kansas City Star; I still have the clipping, now almost dark brown by long oxidation. He proposed that the crust of the earth, riding on a quasi-liquid layer, now and then slides—as someone in costume might move his mask so that, suddenly, the nose is at the top of his head. Thus the poles can move. And when they do, those portions of the earth’s crust that end up at the poles suddenly freeze over; the great masses of ice on the old poles, however, melt. This would suggest, of course, that once Michigan was in the Arctic Circle.

The theory intrigued me despite assurances that science had relegated Thomas to the Crackpot Circle. Then I learned that catastrophism had a serious lineage, of which perhaps the best know figure is George Cuvier (1769-1832). Cuvier persuaded me, waving his encouragement from the nineteenth century, that the facts of catastrophism were in the ground as it were. The cause of cataclysms eluded humanity—and Thomas, therefore, was just another figure who was trying to make sense of the quite incredible. Then Immanuel Velikovsky published his books beginning in 1950 (link to an earlier post). They are a kind of massive assembly of the evidence—together with a theory of why catastrophism has left its traces all over history and the physical world.

Now finally to my subject. The evidence is there, and the most careful write-up of it is by Cuvier. He also had standing. And the right style of presentation. Many others following him have added massively to his own evidence. Velikovsky, by contrast, had two important characteristics that went against him. He was a psychiatrist—therefore he had no standing. And he was a phenomenally good writer. All three of his books, Worlds in Collision, Earth in Upheaval, and Ages in Chaos have the gripping quality of thrillers—although the subjects would be, in most other hands, nothing of the sort.  Inspired by Velikovsky, no doubt, Chan Thomas later wrote his own book, The Adam and Eve Story: The History of Cataclysms (1966); it’s also categorized as a page turner. I’ve not read it, however, so this is hear-say.

Behind Velikovsky’s style is passion—in part aroused by the fantastic patterns his collations of published information revealed, in part by vehement opposition to his “heretical” approaches to a subject that had become sacrosanct when gradualism, based on the theories of Charles Lyell (in geology) and Charles Darwin (in biology), took hold. Cuvier and Lyell overlapped in time. Too bad, I say. This subject merits serious consideration. Cuvier’s findings have never been satisfactorily explained. The consolation is that Velikovsky offers some immensely entertaining summer reading. I’d start with Earth in Upheaval—which sticks closer to physical evidence. But if you’d rather contemplate Venus colliding with the Earth, why then it is Worlds in Collision.

Please Call Ahead. Don’t Just Drop In.

Steady economic growth, thus the time since World War II more or less across the globe, undergird social belief in the regularities of nature. Did the transition to a new millennium occasion a change in the mood? No sooner did year 1 get going than we had 9/11. And since then the times appear disordered, marked, not least, by a Great Recession that, while technically over, hasn’t tangibly passed yet. Is there something, ah, symbolical about the fact that the same event that toppled the twin towers of the World Trade Center also chewed a big piece from the Pentagon? That pattern will be shaped by the poets of a darker future into something compact and memorable as they look back. Here’s one reason why I’d love to have a time machine: I could zip ahead and bring back the myths that have reduced our glory to some fable reminiscent of the Tower of Babel.

Got me thinking of the interplay between gradualism and catastrophism (say in geology, biology). The one represents an interminable period when nothing happens and the other the horrific events that come anyway in the course of which everything goes to hell. That nature offers both is evident—and in most periods (and in most periods gradualism is in the saddle)—catastrophic theories get marginalized at best. Thus in the formation of the solar system the nebular theory rules (see this longish post here), despite the fact that at punctuated intervals evidence of catastrophe forces a temporary pause in our ability to predict everything. Herewith two events and one discovery—all within the last century.

In 1908 an asteroid hit Siberia or, more precisely put, exploded close to the earth. This is known as the Tunguska Event. It affected an area of 830 square miles—which is greater than the combined land area of Dallas and Los Angeles. In 1980 the physicist (and Nobel Prize winner) Luis W. Alvarez, working with his son Walter, identified the site of an ancient impact where some object from space with a six-mile radius hit the tip of the Yucatan Peninsula and, doing so, doomed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. This is known as the Chicxulub crater. In 1993, a comet was observed colliding with Jupiter. It was named after its discoverers, Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker and David Levy, the Shoemaker-Levy 9. That “9” indicates that this team had discovered nine periodic comets of which the one that plunged into Jupiter was the ninth. I remember watching this event on TV. The spot that this collision produced remained visible on the big planet’s surface for several months.

Such news are few and far between, to be sure, only noted with an edge of the attention and then forgotten again. But they signal that we live in a strange world where the regular laws—such as that recessionary drops should be followed by great uplifts of consumption—are sometimes interrupted by events that can—when they bring larger sorts of visitors to earth—change things for generations.

In these times of Gradualism, the asteroid belt that fills the space between Mars and Jupiter is said to be chunks of rocks that never actually managed to cohere enough to form a planet. But in other days astronomers once theorized that an entire planet had peacefully orbited in that region until another body had collided with it and caused it to explode. Now that would have been a right memorable event—no doubt visible even from the planet earth.

Such perspectives rise unbidden as I watch the frenzied exchanges in this election campaign.

Catastrophism

Two events quite recently reminded me of Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979), a Russian-born American scholar. One was a post on Siris (here) about the prehistoric temple site in Turkey called Göbekli Tepe, presumed to be at least 11,000 years old but possibly begun 13,000 years ago. The other was seeing Nova’s program, Megabeasts’ Sudden Death, on Public Television last night. The story makes a very good case, based on examination of glaciers, that the woolly mammoth and other large creatures of North America may have been killed off by a devastating comet strike about 12,900 years ago.

I got interested in Velikovsky—as in other heterodox figures of my own time—in a home-made education that I sometimes liken to the progress of an ass dragging a plow from cactus to cactus; donkeys are said to be able to digest such prickly goods; or this may merely be a fitting myth to characterize the likes of me. This happened in the 1960s. I bought and read in succession some of Velikovsky’s books: Worlds in Collision, Ages in Chaos, and Earth in Upheaval, all published in the 1950s. Velikovsky’s thesis in a nutshell? Many geological, climatic, and historical accounts are best explained by astronomical events of a catastrophic nature. A good deal of discussion in the late 1950s and early ‘60s focused (believe it or not) on the likelihood of global cooling. This got me thinking about, and researching, the cause of the ice ages. I stumbled on Velikovsky in that context and stayed to study his strange theories.

Catastrophism and gradualism are as perennial and persistent in human thought as Platonic and Aristotelian approaches to reality. Two figures whose lives bridged the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the Frenchman George Cuvier (1769-1832) and the Englishman Charles Lyell (1797-1875). Cuvier attempted to explain anomalous phenomena in geology and fossil remains by catastrophic causes; Lyell was a gradualist and influenced Darwin. Someone—perhaps it was Velikovsky—suggested that the English embraced gradualism in horror of the French Revolution. And the Anglo-Saxon world dominance that marked the last century explains why we are all gradualists now. All except the donkeys, of course. The truth of the matter might have been expressed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was once handed two speeches on the same subject, one pro and one con. He handed them to another speech writer and suggested that he sort of blend the two into a third. Catastrophism is not incompatible with gradualism. To combine them we might adopt a phrase of Stephen Jay Gould’s and speak of “punctuated equilibrium.”

In its program on the mammoths, Nova duly bowed in the direction of gradualism by producing professors who expressed deep reservations of extinction by cometary bombs descending from the sky. The tone adopted was all too familiar: superior and dismissive, ex cathedra, as it were. This attitude has always struck me as odd and unscientific—and a signal that ideology is present. Even in a modern landscape scoured clean of any hint of God, scientism spontaneously rears back from anything that might even remotely be read as an act of God.

To this I might add a couple of footnotes. I once conceived of a short story the chief merit of which was its punning title: Dis-Aster. Yes. You guessed it. Someone started a huge comet on its way to Earth to make some point or other—embarrass NASA? To let NASA shine in averting the horror and thus gain additional funding? In any case, just two sheets of notes survive. Thus the first footnote ends and the next begins. Its thrust is to suggest that the imagination soars just pondering whole series of ancient civilizations that might once have flourished before current memories even began…of which Göbekli Tepe might be a token remnant. It delights me to see things open up in all dimensions, up, down, and in both vectors of time.

The three books referenced on Amazon:
Worlds in Collision
Ages in Chaos
Earth in Upheaval