484 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
course, (claim that the demonization of catastrophism arose as a Darwinian plot,
for Lyell’s effort long predates the acceptance of evolutionary theory. But I will
argue that Darwin needed Lyellian geology to grant natural selection (and biotic
competition) a dominant role in setting macroevolutionary pattern. Moreover, I do
not claim that Cuvier was right and Lyell wrong— thereby "correcting" Lyell's
persisting unfairness with a modern version that would be equally false and one-
dimensional in the other direction. Cuvier should not be resurrected as more right
than Lyell, but his views must be reassessed as sufficiently valid to revoke the
license that Darwin recognized as so crucial for granting a dominant relative
frequency to gradual geological change.
Catastrophism as Good Science: Cuvier's Essay
A central irony pervades the story of Lyell's rhetorical victory over catastrophism.
Textbook pap, extending the exaggeration even beyond Lyell's
mischaracterization, has leveled two major charges against the catastrophists: first,
that they downplayed or distorted geological facts to defend their a priori beliefs;
second, that they invented theories primarily to support a religious traditionalism
linked to a restricted time scale and the defense of Noah's flood and other Biblical
stories.
I call this description ironic because all leading catastrophists embraced a
general conception of science entirely contrary to this mischaracterization. The
catastrophist synthesis, as a working theory, rested upon two pillars, one
substantive and the other methodological. Substantively, as the name implies, the
theory regarded major geological change as concentrated in infrequent bursts of
global paroxysm. * But, in a coordinating theme of equal importance, this
sequence of catastrophes imparted a directional history to the earth and life.
Most catastrophists viewed the series of paroxysms as diminishing in intensity
through time. They also postulated a geological dynamics to explain the link of
directionality with occasional paroxysm. The theory of the French geologist Elie
de Beaumont summarized the postulated mechanics of catastrophism. The earth, as
a result of "hot" formation under the nebular hypothesis of Kant and Laplace, has
cooled continuously through time, thus establishing a primary directional vector of
change. This secular cooling engenders a catastrophist dynamics, for the outer
crust solidifies into a rigid shell, while the inner matter, still molten, contracts in
cooling. The "pulling away" of this inner core from the rigid outer crust creates
instability, resolved not by gradual
*The old canard about advocating a short, even a Mosaic, time scale arises from an
illogical extension of this claim. A short time scale does require paroxysm to encompass
events of the geological record within such a limited span. But the converse of this argu-
ment—the claim falsely attributed to catastrophists—does not follow: for a dynamics of
paroxysm does not require or even imply a doctrine of limited time. The earth may be
millions or billions of years old, as the catastrophists believed, and still concentrate its
major changes in brief bursts.