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Velikovsky in Collision
/The following essay was published in/ Ever since Darwin
<#see> /(1977)/.
by Stephen Jay Gould
N
ot long ago, Venus emerged from Jupiter, like Athena from the
brow of Zeus?literally! It then assumed the form and orbit of
a comet. In 1500 B.C., at the time of the Jewish exodus from
Egypt, the earth passed twice through Venus's tail, bringing
both blessing and chaos; manna from heaven (or rather from
hydrocarbons of a cometary tail) and the bloody rivers of the
Mosaic plagues (iron from the same tail). Continuing its
erratic course, Venus collided with (or nearly brushed) Mars,
lost its tail, and hurtled to its present orbit. Mars then
left its regular position and almost collided with the earth
in about 700 B.C. So great were the terrors of these times,
and so ardent our collective desire to forget them, that they
have been erased from our conscious minds. Yet they lurk in
our inherited and unconscious memory, causing fear, neurosis,
aggression, and their social manifestations as war.
This may sound like a script of a very poor, late-late movie
on TV; nonetheless, it represents the serious theory of
Immanuel Velikovsky's /Worlds in Collision/
. And
Velikovsky is neither crank nor charlatan?although to state my
opinion and to quote one of my colleagues, he is at least
gloriously wrong.
/Worlds in Collision/ published twenty-five years ago,
continues to engender intense debate. It also has spawned a
series of issues peripheral to the purely scientific
arguments. Velikovsky was surely ill treated by certain
academics who sought to suppress the publication of his work.
But a man does not attain the status of Galileo merely because
he is persecuted; he must also be right. The scientific and
sociological issues are separate. And then, times and
treatment of heretics have changed. Bruno burned to death;
Galileo, after viewing the instruments of torture, languished
under house arrest. Velikovsky won both publicity and
royalties. Torquemada was evil; Velikovsky's academic enemies,
merely foolish.
As startling as specific claims may be, I am more interested
in Velikovsky's unorthodox method of inquiry and physical
theory. He begins with the working hypothesis that all stories
reported has direct observation in the ancient chronicles are
strictly true?if the Bible reports that the sun stood still,
then it did (as the tug of Venus briefly halted the earth's
rotation). He then attempts to find some physical explanation,
however bizarre, that would render all these stories both
mutually consistent and true. Most scientists would do exactly
the opposite in using the limits of physical possibility to
judge which of the ancient legends might be literally
accurate. (I devote essay 17 to the last important scientific
work that used Velikovsky's method?Thomas Burnet's /Sacred
Theory/ /of the Earth/, first published in the 1680s.)
Secondly, Velikovsky is well aware that the laws of Newton's
universe, where forces of gravitation rule the motion of large
objects, will not allow planets to wander. Thus, he proposes a
fundamentally new physics of electromagnetic forces for large
bodies. In short, Velikovsky would rebuild the science of
celestial mechanics to save the literal accuracy of ancient
legends.
Having devised a cataclysmic theory of human history,
Velikovsky then sought to generalize his physics by extending
it throughout geologic time. In 1955 he published /Earth/ /in/
/Upheaval/, his geologic treaties. With Newton and modern
physics already under siege, he now took on Charles Lyell and
modern geology. He reasoned that if wandering planets had
visited us twice within 3,500 years, then the history of the
earth should be marked by its catastrophes, not by the slow
and gradual change that Lyell's uniformitarianism requires.
Velikovsky scoured the geological literature of the past
hundred years for records of cataclysmic events?floods,
earthquakes, volcanoes, mountain building, mass extinctions,
and shifts of climate. Finding these aplenty, he sought a
common cause:
Sudden the agent must have been and violent; recurrent it
must of been, but at highly erratic intervals; and it must
have been of titanic power.
Not surprisingly, he invoked the electromagnetic forces of
celestial bodies external to the earth. In particular, he
argues that these forces perturb the earth's
rotation?literally turning the earth over in extreme cases and
exchanging poles equators. Velikovsky offers a rather colorful
account of the effects that might accompany such a sudden
shift in the earth's axis of rotation:
At that moment an earthquake would make the globe shudder.
Air and water would continue to move through inertia;
hurricanes would sweep the earth and the seas would rush
over continents. . . . Heat would be developed, rocks
would melt, volcanoes would erupt, lava would flow from
fissures in the ruptured ground and cover vast areas.
Mountains would spring up from the plains.
If the testimony of human narrators provided the evidence for
/Worlds in Collision/, then the geologic record itself must
suffice for /Earth in Upheaval/. Velikovsky's entire argument
hinges on his reading of geological literature. This, I feel,
he does rather badly and carelessly. I will focus upon the
general faults of his procedure, not the refutation of
specific claims.
First, the assumption that similarity of form reflects
simultaneity of occurrence: Velikovsky discusses the fossil
fishes of the Old Red Sandstone, a Devonian formation in
England (350-400 million years old). He cites evidence of
violent death?contortion of the body, lack of prediction, even
signs of "surprise and terror" engraved forever on fossil
faces. He infers that some sudden catastrophe must have
extirpated all these fishes; yet, however unpleasant the death
of any individual, these fishes are distributed through
hundreds of feet of sediments that record several million
years of deposition! Likewise, the craters of the moon are
similar in appearance, and each one formed by the sudden
impact of a meteorite. Yet this influx spans billions of
years, and Velikovsky's favored hypothesis of simultaneous
origin by bubbling on the surface of a molten moon has been
conclusively disproved by the Apollo landings.
Second, the assumption that events are sudden because their
effects are large: Velikovsky writes graphically about the
hundreds of feet of ocean water that were evaporated to form
the great Pleistocene ice sheets. The can envisage the process
only as a result of oceanic boiling followed by a general
refrigeration:
An unusual sequence of events was necessary: the oceans
must have steamed and the vaporized water must have fallen
as snow in latitudes of temperate climates. This sequence
of heat and cold must have taken place in quick succession.
Yet glaciers are not built overnight. They formed "rapidly" by
geological standards, but the few thousand years of their
growth allowed ample time for the gradual accumulation of snow
by new precipitation supplied each year. One need not make the
oceans steam; it still snows in northern Canada.
Third, the inference of worldwide events from local
catastrophes: no geologist has ever denied that /local/
catastrophes occur by flooding, earthquake, or volcanic
eruption. But these events have nothing to do, one way or the
other, with Velikovsky's notion of global catastrophe caused
by sudden shifts in the earth's axis. Nevertheless, most of
Velikovsky's "examples" are just such local events combined
with an unwarranted extrapolation to global impact. He writes,
for example, of the Agate Springs Quarry of Nebraska?a local
mammalian "graveyard" containing the bones (according to one
estimate) of nearly 20,000 large animals. But, this large
aggregation may not record a catastrophic event at all?rivers
and oceans can gradually accumulate vast quantities of bone
and shell (I have walked on beaches composed entirely of large
shells and coral rubble). Also, even if a local flood drowned
these animals, we have no evidence that there contemporary
brethren on other continents were the least bit bothered.
Fourth, the exclusive use of outdated sources: before 1850,
most geologist invoked general catastrophes as the major agent
of geological change. These men were not stupid, and they
argued their position with some cogency. If we read only their
works, their conclusions seem to follow. Velikovsky's entire
discussion of the catastrophic death of European fossil fishes
cites only the work of Hugh Miller in 1841 and of William
Buckland in 1820 and 1837. Surely the past hundred years, with
its voluminous literature, contains something worth noting.
Likewise, Velikovsky relies on John Tyndall's work of 1883 for
his meteorological notions about the origin of ice ages. Yet
scarcely any subject has been more actively discussed in
geological circles during this century.
Fifth, carelessness, inaccuracy, and sleight of hand: /Earth/
/in/ /Upheaval/ is studded with minor errors and half-truths,
unimportant in themselves, but reflecting either a cavalier
attitude towards the geological literature or, more simply, a
failure to understand it. Thus, Velikovsky attacks the
uniformitarian postulate that present causes can explain the
past by arguing that no fossils are forming today. Anyone who
has dug old bones from lake beds or shells from beaches knows
that this claim is simply absurd. Likewise, Velikovsky refutes
Darwinian gradualism with an argument "that some organisms,
like foraminifera, survived all geological ages without
participating in evolution." This claimed was occasionally
made in older literature written before anyone had seriously
studied these single celled creatures. But no one has
maintained it since J. A. Cushman's voluminous descriptive
work of the 1920s. Finally, we learn that igneous
rocks?granite and basalt?"and have embedded in them numberless
living organisms." This is news to me and to the entire
profession of paleontology.
But all these criticisms pale to insignificance before the
most conclusive refutation of Velikovsky's examples ? their
explanation as consequences of continental drift and plate
tectonics. And here Velikovsky is not to blame at all. He has
merely fallen victim ? as have so many others with the most
orthodox among previously cherished opinions ? to this great
revolution in geological thought. In /Earth/ /in/ /Upheaval/,
Velikovsky quite reasonably rejected continental drift as an
alternative explanation for the most important phenomena
supporting his catastrophic theory. And he rejected it for the
reason then most commonly cited among geologist ? the lack of
a mechanism to move the continents. That mechanism has now
been provided with the verification of sea-floor spreading.
The African rift is not a crack formed when the earth turned
over rapidly; it is part of the earth's rift system, and
junction between two crustal plates. The Himalayas did not
rise when the earth shifted but when the Indiana plate slowly
push into Asia. The Pacific volcanoes, a "ring up fire," are
not the product of melting during the last axial displacement;
they mark the boundary between two plates. There are fossil
corals in polar regions, coal in Antarctica, and evidence of
Permian glaciation in tropical South America. But Earth need
not turn over to explain all this; the continents have only to
drift from different climate realms into their present position.
Ironically, Velikovsky has lost more to plate tectonics than
his mechanism of axial shifting; he has probably lost the
entire rationale for his catastrophist position. As Walter
Sullivan argues in his recent book on continental drift, the
theory of plate tectonics has provided a stunning confirmation
of uniformitarianian preferences for ascribing past events to
present causes acting without great deviation from their
current intensity. For the plates are actively moving today,
carrying their continents with them. And to the sweeping
panorama of attendant events?the world wide belt of
earthquakes and volcanoes, the collision of continents, the
mass extinction of faunas (see essay 16)?can be explained by
the continuous movement of these giant plates at rates of only
a few centimeters a year.
The Velikovsky affair raises what is perhaps the most
disturbing question about the public impact of science. How is
a layman to judge rival claims of supposed experts? Any person
with a gift for words can spin a persuasive argument about any
subject not in the domain of a reader's personal expertise.
Even von Daniken sounds good if you just read /Chariots/ /of/
/the/ /Gods/. I am in no position to judge the historical
argument of /Worlds in Collision/. I know little of celestial
mechanics and even less about the history of the Egyptian
Middle Kingdom (although I have heard experts howl about
Velikovsky's unorthodox chronology). I do not wish to assume
that the nonprofessional must be wrong. Yet when I see how
poorly Velikovsky uses the data I am familiar with, then I
must entertain doubts about his handling of material
unfamiliar to me. But what it is a person who knows neither
astronomy, Egyptology, nor geology to do?especially when faced
with a hypothesis so intrinsically exciting and a tendency,
shared, I suspect, by all of us, to root for the underdog?
We know that many fundamental beliefs of modern science are
grows as heretical speculations advanced by nonprofessionals.
Yet history provides a biased filter for our judgment. We sing
praises to the unorthodox hero, but for each successful
heretic, there are a hundred forgotten men who chalked
prevailing notions and lost. Who among you has ever heard of
Eimer, Cuénot, Trueman, or Lang?the primary supporters of
orthogenesis (directed evolution) against the Darwinian tide?
Still, I will continue to root for heresy preached by the
nonprofessional. Unfortunately, I don't think that Velikovsky
will be among the victors in this hardest of all games to win.
( Stephen Jay Gould, "Velikovsky in Collision," /Natural
History/, March 1975; from ///Ever Since Darwin:
/
/Reflections in Natural History/
, New
York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1977, pp. 153-159. )
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