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FIXISTS VS. MOBILISTS IN THE GEOLOGY CONTEST OF THE CENTURY, 1844-1969

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As a geology professor teaching a course in Introductory Geology, it did not make sense to me that Alfred Wegenerʼs theory of continental drift should have been rejected for nearly half a century. From what I knew of his evidence, it seemed convincing enough. Why were geologists so against these ideas? There must have been more to this history than what was commonly known. I began this project with the feeling that the rejection of continental drift was a scandal for geology and for science. Scientists should not reject a correct interpretation for so long. In more familiar scandals, such as recent ones in finance, politics, sports, and religion, one naturally looks for cover-ups. If there were cover-ups here, what was being hidden and who was being protected? I collected all the important historical literature, and I found what I was looking for. This is a revisionist history. It is based largely on a type of historical data that has been overlooked by others – the works of leading geology textbook authors. These authors are especially important, because their textbooks teach students the principles of the science. The theory of continental drift involved a new scientific paradigm, of mobile, not fixed, continents. The textbooks used in introductory geology courses defined the fixist paradigm and influenced the likelihood of a paradigm shift. I have thus paid extra attention to what the main English-language textbook authors wrote, and tried to understand in depth how these highly respected scientists thought. I know from long experience that scientists think just the way other people do.
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... But Schuchert was a fixist and he would continue to play the fixist game, even if he had to break some rules himself. Schuchert probably didn't see it as a kind of game, but I think Willis may have done so (Krill 2011). He liked a geologic challenge, and accepted Schuchert's invitation to meet the nearly impossible challenges of fixist paleogeography. ...
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Two papers, 'Gondwana land bridges' by Charles Schuchert and 'Isthmian links' by Bailey Willis, were published together in 1932. They were apparently motivated by Schuchert's desire to defend his paleogeography of fixed continents against the threat of Alfred Wegener's continental mobilism. Schuchert and Willis both held to land-bridge theory but admitted that they could not accept each other's types of bridges. Schuchert insisted that some bridges had to be wide and of continental material, without explaining why he felt this was so. Willis insisted that wide continental bridges were isostatically and volumetrically impossible; so any ancient bridges that had sunk must have been narrow isthmuses of dense oceanic rocks. They wrote separate papers, but issued together, perhaps to lead readers to the impression that a compromise was possible; but it was not. They avoided alerting readers to fatal flaws in both their models, in part by limiting their discussion to the less familiar southern hemisphere (Gondwana) and never mentioning the continental connection between Europe and North America. Willis went further in his inventions than Schuchert, trying to explain the extremes of Permian climate. Fixed-continent paleogeography required glacial conditions at equatorial latitudes and tropical conditions at arctic latitudes. We now understand that these climate differences can only be explained by 'continental drift' (or plate tectonics), but in his valiant effort to support fixism, Willis postulated not only tectonic uplifts of oceanic isthmuses, but also uplifts in continental areas that were known to be stable.
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Textbooks teach the principles of science. Lyellʼs geology textbooks emphasized vertical crustal movement. He avoided far-fetched continental-drift hypotheses by Hopkins in 1844 and Pepper in 1861. Their notions of drift were supported by fossil and paleoclimate evidence, but their causes were global magnetism and electrochemical crystallization and dissolution. Danaʼs textbooks from 1863 to 1895 taught that the symmetry of North America proved it had always stood alone; thus Americans were conditioned to reject Wegenerʼs concept of a Carboniferous supercontinent. Unaware of Wegenerʼs hypothesis in 1912, Schuchert launched a textbook series that guided American geological opinion from 1915 to the 1960s. His paleogeographic models required Carboniferous land bridges to connect fixed continents. He and coauthors Longwell and Dunbar eventually realized that Wegenerʼs continental-drift hypothesis would disprove land-bridge theory and solve problems of mountain ranges, paleoclimates, and fossil distributions, but they guarded against it in their textbooks. Already in 1927, Holmes proposed that convection with sea-floor spreading drove continental drift, but editor Schuchert would not publish that breakthrough. Geologists Du Toit, Van der Gracht, Holmes, Shand, Bailey, and Grabau showed the merits of continental drift, but their publications had little impact. Willis accepted the invitations of Schuchert in 1932 and Longwell in 1944 to write papers opposing Wegenerʼs hypothesis. Simpson contributed with paleontologic opposition. In 1944 Holmes published a British textbook that showed how continental drift could change geology. It was Holmes, Carey, and Wilson, as much as the Americans Hess and Dietz, who should be credited with instigating the plate-tectonic revolution.