Tiers of Time and Trials of Extrapolationism 1303
what has been already said on the probable wide intervals of time between our
consecutive formations; and in these intervals there may have been much slow
extermination. Moreover, when by sudden immigration or by unusually rapid
development, many species of a new group have taken possession of a new
area, they will have exterminated in a correspondingly rapid manner many of
the old inhabitants; and the forms which thus yield their places will commonly
be allied, for they will partake of some inferiority in common. Thus, as it
seems to me, the manner in which single species and whole groups of species
become extinct, accords well with the theory of natural selection.I have discussed Darwin's defense of uniformitarian extrapolation in detail
because his argument, in this case, proved so successful in directing more than a
century of research away from any consideration of truly catastrophic mass
extinction, and towards a virtually unchallenged effort to spread the deaths over
sufficient time to warrant an ordinary gradualistic explanation in conventional
Darwinian terms, with any environmentally triggered acceleration of rate only
serving to intensify the effects of ordinary competition, species by species. I can't
think of any other prominent subject in paleontology where uniformitarian
presuppositions clamped such a tight and efficient lid upon any consideration of
empirically legitimate and conceptually plausible catastrophic scenarios. Merely to
suggest such a thing (as even so prominent a scientist as Schindewolf, 1963,
discovered) was to commit an almost risible apostasy.
In particular, these uniformitarian assumptions about the extended duration of
apparent mass extinctions led geologists and paleontologists to favor earth-based
rather than cosmic physical inputs (for most plausible extraterrestrial causes work
with greater speed and intensity), and to focus upon telluric influences (like changing
climates and sea levels) that could most easily be rendered as gradualistic in style. So
strongly entrenched did this prejudice remain, even spilling over into popular culture
as well, that a few years after Alvarez et al. (1980) published their plausible, and by
then increasingly well affirmed, scenario of extraterrestrial impact as a catastrophic
trigger for the Cretaceous-Tertiary event, the New York Times even ridiculed the idea
in their editorial pages, proclaiming (April 2, 1985) that "terrestrial events, like
volcanic activity or changes in climate or sea level, are the most immediate possible
causes of mass extinctions. Astronomers should leave to astrologers the task of
seeking the cause of earthly events in the stars." *
- Iām usually quite unshockable, and nothing from the fourth estate (even so high a
denizen thereof as the New York Times) ever surprises me. But I was amazed that America's
most distinguished newspaper would editorialize against a theory so clearly subject to
empirical test and so eminently interesting as well. I ended up by sounding off in a popular
commentary for Discover Magazine (October, 1985) with a title parody on the Times's
venerable motto: "All the News That's Fit to Print and Some Opinions that Aren't." I
commented (Gould, 1985b) that the absurdity of their overreach might best be grasped by
comparison with a hypothetical editorial that might have appeared in the Osservatore
Romano (the official Vatican newspaper) for June 22, 1633: "Now that Signor Galileo,
albeit under