1 The Rejection of Continental Drift: Theory and Method in American Earth Science by Naomi Oreskes

Author:Naomi Oreskes [Oreskes, Naomi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science, Earth Sciences, Geology
ISBN: 9780195353600
Google: EEQdk9GRfkoC
Amazon: 0195117336
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1999-03-04T23:00:00+00:00

Schuchert's substantive uniformitarianism and the logical constrictions it entailed are in full evidence here. On the one hand, he denied that large-scale drift had occurred. On the other hand, he argued that if it had occurred, it must have done so throughout geological history.

Eight years later, he was still arguing the point. "I know that parts of the continents do move hundreds of miles," he wrote in 1931, "but I completely reject the wholesale sliding of Wegener."83 Reginald Daly failed to comprehend the distinction.

"You do not give a lot of rope when you say 'hundreds of miles,'" he complained. "Where is the logical stopping point, once you go that far? I mean, in the physics of the thing?"84 But, as Schuchert's correspondence with Holmes makes clear, the stopping point lay not in physics but in the practice of historical geology. A few hundred miles of drift could be tolerated, because that would leave faunal zones intact. But a few thousand miles would mean a radical rethinking of his uniformitarianism. Thus Schuchert concluded an earlier letter to Daly, "I have no faith in the sliding theory of Wegener, but more in the one of Joly, and because the latter does not disturb my paleogeography!"85

It might be objected that crustal dislocations could be seen. Schuchert acknowledged as much in several of his letters; Andrew Lawson had recently demonstrated that the western side of the San Andreas Fault was moving northward. But Lawson's results could be accommodated by the allowance of a few hundred kilometers of movement and, in any event, as Schuchert had put it to Molengraaf, "what the rate is per thousand years no one has as yet the faintest idea."86 Schuchert's position in 1933 was thus the same as it had been in 1923: moderate-scale movements, yes; wholescale drift, no. His position was a compromise between the compelling geological evidence of lateral movements and a uniformitarian commitment to the integrity of faunal zones.

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