Comments on: Book review – Cataclysms: A New Geology for the Twenty-First Century

By: Book review – On the Origin of Evolution: Tracing ‘Darwin’s Dangerous Idea’ from Aristotle to DNA | The Inquisitive Biologist

Wed, 18 Aug 2021 07:46:54 +0000

[…] ultimately became accepted but leave out the next chapter: the mass-extinction debates, which was a conflict between uniformitarianism and catastrophism. Similarly, they recognize Wallace as the grandfather of biogeography but leave out how the […]

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By: Book review – Rates of Evolution: A Quantitative Synthesis | The Inquisitive Biologist

Wed, 03 Feb 2021 15:04:40 +0000

[…] proponent of this idea, which sees geological change as slow and gradual, to the exclusion of cataclysmic explanations. Lyell heavily influenced Darwin’s thinking . One alternative to this notion of gradualism is […]

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By: Book review – Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene | The Inquisitive Biologist

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 17:15:09 +0000

[…] years, that Sepkoski mentions several times. Without going into the nitty-gritty, he leaves out two recent books arguing in favour, but, more importantly, he does not mention that this idea is not […]

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By: Book review – Terrestrial Impact Structures: The TanDEM-X Atlas (2-Volume Set) | The Inquisitive Biologist

Fri, 27 Nov 2020 19:57:02 +0000

[…] framework as the result of cryptovolcanism or cryptoexplosions, rather than accepting catastrophist explanations. The authors are particularly mindful to highlight the rationale behind disagreements on age or […]

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By: Book review – Fire in the Sky: Cosmic Collisions, Killer Asteroids, and the Race to Defend Earth | The Inquisitive Biologist

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 12:07:03 +0000

[…] academic establishment did not. They were still held in thrall by the geological doctrine of uniformitarianism, which held that changes on Earth happened gradually through known processes. When the famous […]

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By: Book review – Fire in the Sky: Cosmic Collisions, Killer Asteroids, and the Race to Defend Earth | The Inquisitive Biologist

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 17:04:06 +0000

[…] which held that changes on Earth happened gradually through known processes (see my review of Cataclysms: A New Geology for the Twenty-First Century for more). When the famous geologist Grove Karl Gilbert mounted an expedition to Coon Mountain in […]

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By: Book review – Rates of Evolution: A Quantitative Synthesis | The Inquisitive Biologist

Tue, 24 Sep 2019 11:15:17 +0000

[…] proponent of this idea, which sees geological change as slow and gradual (see also my review of Cataclysms: A New Geology for the Twenty-First Century). Lyell heavily influenced Darwin’s thinking (see also Darwin’s First Theory: Exploring […]

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By: Book review – Cosmic Impact: Understanding the Threat to Earth from Asteroids and Comets | The Inquisitive Biologist

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 09:07:15 +0000

[…] May starts off with a short history of comets and asteroids. It obviously took a while before shooting stars were recognised for what they were: not bad omens, but hunks of space junk. Even so, the possibility of cosmic impacts was long dismissed. Although May doesn’t mention him by name, it was Scottish geologist Charles Lyell’s doctrine of uniformitarianism (May instead calls it gradualism in this book) that long held sway and pretty much ruled out (cosmic) catastrophes. The pseudoscience espoused in the 1950s by psychologist Immanuel Velikovsky (see The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe) also did not help its credibility. But, as documented at length elsewhere, it eventually became an accepted idea (see my reviews of Four Revolutions in the Earth Sciences: From Heresy to Truth and Cataclysms: A New Geology for the Twenty-First Century). […]

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By: Book review – The Dinosaurs Rediscovered: How a Scientific Revolution is Rewriting History | The Inquisitive Biologist

Fri, 12 Apr 2019 13:21:40 +0000

[…] Mass Extinctions), despite the initial pushback from the uniformitarian crowd (see my review of Cataclysms: A New Geology for the Twenty-First Century), and he provides a great overview of why this idea has become so widely accepted. Even here, facts […]

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By: Book review – Lamarck’s Revenge: How Epigenetics Is Revolutionizing Our Understanding of Evolution’s Past and Present | The Inquisitive Biologist

Tue, 08 Jan 2019 09:28:23 +0000

[…] was heavily influenced by Lyell’s idea of uniformitarianism (introduced in my review of Cataclysms: A New Geology for the Twenty-First Century) and Malthus’s ideas on overpopulation (see my review of his An Essay on the Principle of […]

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