Pattern and Progress on the Geological Stage 485
change, but by rare, global paroxysms, when the crust fractures and collapses upon
the shrunken core. Life's vector of progress records an increasing adaptation to
harsher climates of a cooling earth.
Since a coordinating vector of temporal cooling generates the entire system,
and since many scientists and historians regard the theme of directionalism as even
more central than the dynamics of paroxysm, several scholars have urged, in recent
years, that the entire movement be redesignated as the "directionalist synthesis,"
rather than "catastrophism." The major "catastrophists" never defined themselves
as a school opposed to a dichotomous Lyellian alternative, and therefore never
gave their movement a name. The construction of such a dichotomy, with moral
values attached to each side, set a major aspect of Lyell's rhetorical strategy.
Methodologically, all leading catastrophists adopted a distinctive attitude
towards the geological record. They preached a radical empirical literalism:
interpret what you see as a true and accurate record of actual events, and in-
terpolate nothing. If horizontal strata overlie a sequence of broken and tilted beds,
then a catastrophe must have terminated one world and initiated another, as the
geological discontinuity implies. If one fauna disappeared at such a boundary, and
younger beds contain fossils of different creatures, then a mass extinction must
have eradicated the older fauna. The catastrophists advocated directionalism as a
primary theme for the earth's history, and empirical literalism as a fundamental
approach to science.
How ironic, then, that modern textbook cardboard should misidentify Lyell as
an empiricist who, by laborious fieldwork and close attention to objective
information, drove the dogmatists of catastrophism out of science. To the contrary,
the catastrophists were the empirical literalists of their time! Lyell and Darwin
opposed catastrophism by probing "behind appearance" to interpret, rather than
simply to record, the data of geology. For Lyell and Darwin, the geological record
must be treated as imperfect to an extreme degree—in the standard metaphor
developed by Lyell and propagated by Darwin, like a book with few pages
preserved and only a few letters surviving on each of these pages. Moreover, Lyell
argued, the geological record has also become distorted in a systematic way that
would foster a false concept of change if we attempted a literal reading. Geological
unconformities and local extinctions look paroxysmal, but only because slow, daily
changes rarely leave any evidentiary trace at all. We therefore can observe only the
infrequently preserved waystations of a true continuity, and we misinterpret the
massive lacunae as evidence for rapid change. If, to cite Lyell's example, Vesuvius
erupted again and buried a modern Italian town directly atop Pompeii, would we
interpret history by the literal evidence of a Latin culture suddenly extirpated in a
(potentially global) episode of volcanism, then followed by the saltational origin of
a distinct, but clearly allied, Italian civilization, accompanied by such new cultural
artifacts as beer cans and electric bulbs?
Proper procedure in geology, Lyell asserted, requires that we interpolate into
a systematically impoverished record the unpreserved events implied by our best
theoretical understanding. Lyell and Darwin worked by interpretation