As the new Darwinian orthodox' swept through Europe, its most brilliant opponent, the aging embryologist Karl Ernst von Baer, remarked with bitter irony that every triumphant theory passes through three stages: first it is dismissed as untrue; then it is rejected as contrary to religion; finally, it is accepted as dogma and each scientist claims that he had long appreciated its truth.
I first met the theory of continental drift when it labored under the inquisition of stage two. Kenneth Caster, the only major American paleontologist who dared to support it openly, came to lecture at my alma mater, Antioch College. We were scarcely known as a bastion of entrenched conservatism, but most of us dismissed his thoughts as just this side of sane. (Since I am now in von Baer's third stage, I have the distinct memory that Caster sowed substantial seeds of doubt in my own mind.) A few years later, as a graduate student at Columbia University, I remember the a priori derision of my distinguished stratigraphy professor toward a visiting Australian drifter. He nearly orchestrated the chorus of Bronx cheers from a sycophantic crowd of loyal students. (Again, from my vantage point in the third stage, I recall this episode as amusing, but distasteful.) As a tribute to my professor, I must record that he experienced a rapid conversion just two years later and spent his remaining years joyously redoing his life's work.
Today, just ten years later, my own students would dismiss with even more derision anyone who denied the evident truth of continental drift-a prophetic madman is at least amusing; superannuated fuddy-duddy is merely pitiful. Why has such profound change occurred in the short space of a decade?
Most scientists maintain-or at least argue for public consumption-that their profession marches toward truth by accumulating more and more data, under the guidance of an infallible procedure called "the scientific method." If this were true, my question would have an easy answer. The facts, as known ten years ago, spoke against continental drift; since then, we have learned more and revised our opinions accordingly. I will argue, however, that this scenario is both inapplicable in general and utterly inaccurate in this case.
During the period of nearly universal rejection, direct evidence for continental drift-that is, the data gathered from rocks exposed on our continents-was every bit as good as it is today. It was dismissed because no one had devised a physical mechanism that would permit continents to plow through an apparently solid oceanic floor. In the absence of a plausible mechanism, the idea of continental drift was rejected as absurd. The data that seemed to support it could always be explained away. If these explanations sounded contrived or forced, they were not half so improbable as the alternative-accepting continental drift. During the past ten years, we have collected a new set of data, this time from the ocean basins. With these data, a heavy dose of creative imagination, and a better understanding of the earth's interior, we have fashioned a new theory of planetary dynamics. Under this theory of plate tectonics, continental drift is an inescapable consequence. The old data from continental rocks, once soundly rejected, have been exhumed and exalted as conclusive proof of drift. In short, we now accept continental drift because it is the expectation of a new orthodoxy.
I regard this tale as typical of scientific progress. New facts, collected in old ways under the guidance of old theories, rarely lead to any substantial revision of thought. Facts do not "speak for themselves"; they are read in the light of theory. Creative thought, in science as much as in the arts, is the motor of changing opinion. Science is a quintessentially human activity, not a mechanized, robotlike accumulation of objective information, leading by laws of logic to inescapable interpretation. I will try to illustrate this thesis with two examples drawn from the "classical" data for continental drift. Both are old tales that had to be undermined while drift remained unpopular.
I. The late Paleozoic glaciation. About 240 million years ago, glaciers covered parts of what is now South America, Antarctica, India, Africa, and Australia. If continents are stable, this distribution presents some apparently insuperable difficulties:
All these difficulties evaporate if the southern continents (including India) were joined together during this glacial period, and located farther south, covering the South Pole; the South American glaciers moved from Africa, not an open ocean; "tropical" Africa and "semitropical" India were near the South Pole; the North Pole lay in the middle of a major ocean, and glaciers could not develop in the Northern Hemisphere. Sounds good for drift; indeed, no one doubts it today.
II. The distribution of Cambrian trilobites -(fossil arthropods living 500 to 600 million years ago). The Cambrian trilobites of Europe and North America divided themselves into two rather different faunas with the following peculiar distribution on modem maps. "Atlantic" province trilobites lived all over Europe and in a few very local areas on the far eastern border of North America--eastern (but not western) Newfoundland and southeastern Massachusetts, for example. "Pacific" province trilobites lived all over America and in a few local areas on the extreme western coast of Europe -northern Scotland and northwestern Norway, for example. It is devilishly difficult to make any sense of this distribution if the two continents always stood 3,000 miles apart.
But continental drift suggests a striking resolution. In Cambrian times, Europe and North America were separated: Atlantic trilobites lived in waters around Europe; Pacific trilobites in waters around America. The continents (now including sediments with entombed trilobites) then drifted toward each other and finally joined together. Later, they split again, but not precisely along the line of their previous junction. Scattered bits of ancient Europe, carrying Atlantic trilobites, remained at the easternmost border of North America, while a few pieces of old North America stuck to the westernmost edge of Europe.
Both examples are widely cited as "proofs" of drift today, but they were soundly rejected in previous years, not because their data were any less complete but only because no one had devised an adequate mechanism to move continents. All the original drifters imagined that continents plow their way through a static ocean floor. Alfred Wegener, the father of continental drift, argued early in our century that gravity alone could put continents in motion. Continents drift slowly westward, for example, because attractive forces of the sun and moon hold them up as the earth rotates underneath them. Physicists responded with derision and showed mathematically that gravitational forces are far too weak to power such a monumental peregrination. So Alexis du Toit, Wegener's South African champion, tried a different tack. He argued for a local, radioactive melting of oceanic floor at continental borders, permitting the continents to glide through. This ad hoc hypothesis added no increment of plausibility to Wegener's speculation. Since drift seemed absurd in the absence of a mechanism, orthodox geologists set out to render the impressive evidence for it as a series of unconnected coincidences.
In 1932, the famous American geologist Bailey Willis strove to make the evidence of glaciation compatible with static continents. He invoked the deus ex machina of "isthmian links"-narrow land bridges flung with daring abandon across 3,000 miles of ocean. He placed one between eastern Brazil and western Africa, another from Africa all the way to India via the Malagasy Republic, and a third from Vietnam through Borneo and New Guinea to Australia. His colleague, Yale professor Charles Schuchert, added one from Australia to Antarctica and another from Antarctica to South America, thus completing the isolation of a southern ocean from the rest of the world's waters. Such an isolated ocean might freeze along its southern margin, permitting glaciers to flow across into eastern South America. Its cold waters would also nourish the glaciers of southern Africa. The Indian glaciers, located above the equator 3,000 miles north of any southern ice, demanded a separate explanation. Willis wrote: "No direct connection between the occurrences can reasonably be assumed. The case must be considered on the basis of a general cause and the local geographic and topographic conditions." Willis's inventive mind was equal to the task: he simply postulated a topography so elevated that warm, wet southern waters precipitated their product as snow. For the absence of ice in temperate and arctic zones of the Northern Hemisphere, Willis reconstructed a system of ocean currents that permitted him to postulate "a warm, subsurface current flowing northward beneath cooler surface waters and rising in the Arctic as a warm-water heating system." Schuchert was delighted with the resolution provided by isthmian links:
Grant the biogeographer Holarctis, a land bridge from northern Africa to Brazil, another from South America to Antarctis (it almost exists today), still another from this polar land to Australia and from the latter across the Arafura Sea to Borneo and Sumatra and so on to Asia, plus the accepted means of dispersal along shelf seas and by wind and water currents and migratory birds, and he has all the possibilities needed to explain the life dispersion and the land and ocean realms throughout geological time on the basis of the present arrangement of the continents.
The only common property shared by all these land bridges was their utterly hypothetical status; not an iota of direct evidence supported any one of them. Yet, lest the saga of isthmian links be read as a warped fairy tale invented by dogmatists to support an untenable orthodoxy, I point out that to Willis, Schuchert, and any right-thinking geologist of the 1930s, one thing legitimately seemed ten times as absurd as imaginary land bridges thousands of miles long-continental drift itself.
In the light of such highly fertile imaginations, the Cambrian trilobites could present no insuperable problem. The Atlantic and Pacific provinces were interpreted as different environments, rather than different places-shallow water for the Pacific, deeper for the Atlantic. With a freedom to invent nearly any hypothetical geometry for Cambrian ocean basins, geologists drew their maps and hewed to their orthodoxy.
When continental drift came into fashion during the late 1960s, the classical data from continental rocks played no role at all: drift rode in on the coattails of a new theory, supported by new types of evidence. The physical absurdities of Wegener's theory rested on his conviction that continents cut their way through the ocean floor. But how else could drift occur? The ocean floor, the crust of the earth, must be stable. After all, where could it go, if it moved in pieces, without leaving gaping holes in the earth? Nothing could be clearer. Or could it?
"Impossible" is usually defined by our theories, not given by nature. Revolutionary theories trade in the unexpected. If continents must plow through oceans, then drift will not occur; suppose, however, that continents are frozen into the oceanic crust and move passively as pieces of crust shift about. But we just stated that the crust cannot move without leaving holes. Here, we reach an impasse that must be bridged by creative imagination, not just by another field season in the folded Appalachians-we must model the earth in a fundamentally different way.
We can avoid the problem of holes with a daring postulate that seems to be valid. If two pieces of ocean floor move away from each other, they will leave no hole if material rises from the earth's interior to fill the gap. We can go further by reversing the causal implications of this statement: the rise of new material from the earth's interior may be the driving force that moves old sea floor away. But since the earth is not expanding, we must also have regions where old sea floor founders into the earth's interior, thus preserving a balance between creation and destruction.
Indeed, the earth's surface seems to be broken into fewer than ten major "plates," bounded on all sides by narrow zones of creation (oceanic ridges) and destruction (trenches). Continents are frozen into these plates, moving with them as the sea floor spreads away from zones of creation at oceanic ridges. Continental drift is no longer a proud theory in its own right; it has become a passive consequence of our new orthodoxy-plate tectonics.
We now have a new, mobilist orthodoxy, as definite and uncompromising as the staticism it replaced. In its light, the classical data for drift have been exhumed and proclaimed as proof positive. Yet these data played no role in validating the notion of wandering continents; drift triumphed only when it became the necessary consequence of a new theory.
The new orthodoxy colors our vision of all data; there are no "pure facts" in our complex world. About five years ago, paleontologists found on Antarctica a fossil reptile named Lystrosaurus. It also lived in South Africa, and probably in South America as well (rocks of the appropriate age have not been found in South America). If anyone had floated such an argument for drift in the presence of Willis and Schuchert, he would have been howled down-and quite correctly. For Antarctica and South America are almost joined today by a string of islands, and they were certainly connected by a land bridge at various times in the past (a minor lowering of sea level would produce such a land bridge today). Lystrosaurus may well have walked in comfort, on a rather short journey at that. Yet the New York Times wrote an editorial proclaiming, on this basis alone, that continental drift had been proved.
Many readers may be disturbed by my argument for the primacy of theory. Does it not lead to dogmatism and disrespect for fact? It can, of course, but it need not. The lesson of history holds that theories are overthrown by rival theories, not that orthodoxies are unshakable. In the meantime, I am not distressed by the crusading zeal of plate tectonics, for two reasons. My intuition, culturally bound to be sure, tells me that it is basically true. My guts tell me that it's damned exciting-more than enough to show that conventional science can be twice as interesting as anything invented by all the von Danikens and in all the Bermuda triangles of this and previous ages of human gullibility.