Read Supercontinent: Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet Online
Authors: Ted Nield
Supercontinent: Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet (31 page)
Therefore how grotesque was it to read, just seven days after the tsunami struck, in the
Sunday Telegraph
, whose front pages were given over to detailed geological explanations of the earthquake and tsunami, of a new folly being made ready for its first visitors in Petersburg, Kentucky, USA. Called the Museum of Creation and costing about the same as Hyderabad’s tsunami early-warning centre, the theme of this particular park is the literal truth of the Old Testament creation myth, which it seeks to uphold against all (genuine) scientific evidence. Just as the Tamil devotees appeal to outmoded nineteenth-century science to bolster the idea that their national myth is literally true, here the Old Testament creation
story is bolstered by what the museum’s backers call ‘creation science’.
This non-subject, devised by young-Earth creationists to lend credibility to their prejudices, is alas much more than some regrettable but harmless local dispute about the romantic tales of ancient poets. Overenthusiastic appeals by Tamil politicians to a few outdated science references may occasionally be embarrassing for their academics; but it remains, at most, a little local difficulty. On the other hand, the purpose of ‘creation science’ is to misrepresent real knowledge in a crusade to replace free enquiry with slavish adherence to simplistic dogma – with belief in the Word before the world.
I have tried in this book to show something of how ideas in science often grade into – perhaps even sometimes derive from – ideas in myth, and I have done this to show how important it is to know the difference between the two. The truth is that we, as a species, can no longer afford the luxury of irrationality and prejudice. We are too many and too powerful to live in dreams. And the greatest and most irrational of the prejudices from which we must free ourselves is one identified by Lucretius in the last century BC: the belief that the world was made for us.
The supercontinent story tells us, like no other in Earth science, that she was
not
made for us – any more than she was made for the trilobites that grubbed around in vanished Iapetus, or for the
Glossopteris
tree or the little
Mesosaurus
, whose fossils reunited Gondwanaland, or the tiny feeding-trace
Oldhamia
, on whom John Joly mused. Douglas Adams picked up this theme in what I call his ‘parable of the puddle’:
… imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting hole I find myself in. It fits me staggeringly well; must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea
that as the sun rises in the sky … and the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging onto the notion that everything is going to be all right because this world was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch-out for …
We can, if we choose, either fret over our lost futurity or comfort ourselves with the thought that one day our species may shuck its bonds and spread throughout the galaxy; and that our space-going descendants may, millions of years in the future, rediscover our home planet after the greatest racial diaspora of all. Maybe that way, our direct offspring will see the next supercontinent on Earth. But this is a long shot. Until we can live without her, Earth is not a part of
our
story – we are a part of
hers
.
As the poet Hugh MacDiarmid put it:
What happens to us
Is irrelevant to the world’s geology
But what happens to the world’s geology
Is not irrelevant to us.
Science has been trying to humble the hubris of humans from the start, in a series of what Sigmund Freud referred to as ‘
dethronements
’. The first dethronement was of the Earth as the centre of the universe. Second was our own dethronement as a unique creation in the image of God. Third (in Freud’s opinion) was his demystification of the human mind’s deepest motivations.
Science is not often thanked for delivering such slights to our
collective ego; though in fact these blows have been nothing like crushing enough. For when, like Douglas Adams’s puddle, we find ourselves standing on the brink of destruction it will be our arrogance, as much as the ignorance on which it feeds, that will prove our undoing.
Science cannot tell us everything that matters about being human, but it provides us with the only practical knowledge of the natural world in which we have any reason to believe. We know this because it works. But science also teaches us another important lesson – that there is no absolute knowledge of any kind – either about the Earth, or anything else. True, science can put some things past reasonable doubt: organic evolution or the age of the Earth are now well beyond that point. Despite what they may tell you in the Museum of Creation, the likelihood such basic scientific ideas being simply wrong is precisely nil. But the key word here is
reasonable
. Nothing ever remains beyond unreasonable doubt, especially to the fanatical adherents of outworn creeds who desire only to enslave.
The discovery of deep time is perhaps the greatest single liberating contribution that Earth science has made to wider culture. Conceiving of a timeframe large enough to encompass many repetitions of a cycle that can span 500 million years or more changes one’s perspectives – especially on how properly to judge the relationship between ourselves and the Earth. As our species becomes more numerous and powerful, our last chance of long-term survival will depend on embracing yet another dethronement. We have to realize that we are the puddle, at the mercy of circumstances, but at least able to figure out how to keep ourselves alive and comfortable if we use the capacities with which evolution has equipped us.
Lucretius, speculating about the age of the Earth, came to the mistaken conclusion that it was new. For if not, he asked, where were the works of the poets who sang before Homer? Twenty centuries later John Joly wrote in reply:
We do not ask if other Iliads have perished; or if poets before Homer have vainly sung, becoming a prey to all-consuming time. We move in a greater history, the landmarks of which are not the birth and death of kings and poets, but of species, genera, orders. And we set out these organic events not according to the passing generations of man, but over scores or hundreds of millions of years. We are … in possession today of some of those lost Iliads and Odysseys for which Lucretius looked in vain.
Adams, Douglas, 2002.
The Salmon of Doubt
. Pan. 284pp. Posthumous collection of writings by the renowned author of
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
. Contains the ‘parable of the puddle’ in the essay ‘Is there an artificial God?’
Benton, Michael J., 2003.
When Life Nearly Died – The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time
. Thames & Hudson. 336pp. Readable
text-book
by an acknowledged expert and popularizer, focusing on the end-Permian extinction and possible reasons for it.
Bronowski, J., 1973.
The Ascent of Man
. BBC. 448pp. Accessible and authoritative examination of the place of science within the rise of human civilization.
DeCamp, L. Sprague, 1954 (rev. 1970).
Lost Continents: The Atlantis Theme in History, Science and Literature
. Gnome Press (1954), Dover Publications (1970). 348pp. Spirited account of the influence of Plato’s Atlantis story on subsequent lost-world makers.
Greene, Mott T., 1982.
Geology in the Nineteenth Century: Changing Views of a Changing World
. Cornell University Press. 324pp. A classic, well-written analysis of Earth science’s heroic age, including the origins of drift theory.
Koertge, Noretta (ed.), 1998.
A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths About Science
. Oxford University Press. 322pp. A selection of essays by scientists and philosophers that examine postmodern constructions of science and analyse the political damage they inflict upon science in society.
McMenamin, M., 1998.
The Garden of Ediacara: Discovering the First Complex Life
. Columbia University Press. 295pp. An idiosyncratic view of how complex life first evolved on the shores of the supercontinent Rodinia.
Oreskes, Naomi, 1999.
The Rejection of Continental Drift – Theory and Method in American Earth Science
. Oxford University Press. 420pp. Insightful analysis of the true sociocultural reasons why US scientists found Wegener so hard to swallow.
Oreskes, Naomi, 2003.
Plate tectonics: An Insider’s History of the Modern Theory of the Earth
. Westview Press. 424pp. Accounts in their own words by many of the surviving major players in the plate-tectonic revolution.
Ramaswamy, Sumathi, 2004.
The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories
. University of California Press. 334pp. On the interface between Lemuria, Tamil world history and culture. Superb scholarly study by the noted Tamil cultural historian.
Rogers, John J. W., & Santosh, M., 2004.
Continents and Supercontinents
. Oxford University Press, New York. 289pp. Graduate/postgraduate level academic textbook for Earth scientists on the Supercontinent Cycle.
Vrielynck, Bruno, & Bouysse, Philippe, 2003.
The Changing Face of the Earth: The Break-up of Pangaea and Continental Drift over the Past 250 Million Years in Ten Steps
. Commission for the Geological Map of the World/UNESCO publishing. Available from CMGW, Paris
http://ccgm.free.fr/
33pp + CD ROM.
Winchester, Simon, 2005.
A Crack in the Edge of the World – The Great American Earthquake of 1906
. Viking Penguin. 412pp. Immensely readable account of the whys, wherefores and social context of the San Andreas Fault and San Francisco’s greatest calamity.
www.thefutureiswild.com
for information on the TV documentary and how to get hold of the CD set produced by Paramount Home Entertainment.
Abyssinia,
1
Académie Française,
1
acritarchs,
1
Adam and Eve,
1
‘parable of the puddle’,
1
Adams, John,
1
Afghanistan,
1
Livingstone’s exploration,
1
and Pannotia,
1
and Ur,
1
Ager, Derek,
1
Albany Belt,
1
Algeria,
1
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
(Carroll),
1
,
2
,
3
aluminium,
1
Amazon basin,
1
Amazonia,
1
American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG),
1
see also
North America; South America
amphibians,
1
Annales Veteris Testamenti
(Ussher),
1
Anstone,
1
Antarctic, Scott’s expedition to,
1
Antarctic Peninsula,
1
Ortelius and,
1
and Rodinia,
1
anthropology,
1
Antichthon,
1
Antwerp,
1
Apparent Polar Wander (APW),
1
aragonite,
1
archaebacteria,
1
archaeology,
1
Archimedes Palimpsest
,
1
Arctic expeditions,
1
Arctic Ocean,
1
Argand, Émile,
1
Argentina,
1
aridity, of supercontinents,
1
Aristotle,
1
arthropods,
1
astronomy,
1
Atkinson, Edward,
1
Atlanteans,
1
and congruent mountain ranges,
1
formation of,
1
rainfall over,
1
Atlantis: the Antediluvian World
(Donnelly),
1
Atlas computer program,
1
Atlas mountains,
1
atmosphere,
see
Earth’s atmosphere atoms,
1
,
2
and AUSWUS configuration,
1
coastal shelf,
1
and Grenvillian Orogeny,
1
and Pannotia,
1
and Rodinia,
1
Australian Plate,
1
Austria-Hungary,
1
Austrian Geological Survey,
1
AUSWUS configuration,
1
bacteria,
1
Badcock, Canon Baynes,
1
Badcock, Mary,
1
Bailey, Sir Edward Battersby,
1
Bakevellia Sea,
1
Balearic Islands,
1
Bali,
1
Balmat, Jacques,
1
Baltica,
1
Banded Iron Formations (BIFs),
1
,
2
,
3
Banyak,
1
Barry, Patrick,
1
Batu Islands,
1
Bay of Manar,
1
Bay of Naples,
1
Beardmore Glacier,
1
Bedale,
1
Beethoven, Ludwig van,
1
Belgium,
1
Bengal,
1
Bianca, Elio,
1
biomarkers,
1
biosphere,
1
‘deep’,
1
biotite,
1
black smokers,
1
Blanford, Henry Francis,
1
,
2
,
3
,
4
,
5
,
6
Blanford, William Thomas,
1
,
2
,
3
,
4
,
5
Blavatsky, Madame,
1
Blue mountains,
1
Blue Ridge mountains,
1
Bolivia,
1
Borborema Belt,
1
Boschi, Enzo,
1
boulder clay,
1
Bourbon, Charles and Camilla de,
1
Bourbourg, Charles Etienne, Abbé de,
1
Bowers, Henry,
1
Bowie, William,
1
Bray Head,
1
Briant, Keith,
1
see also
United Kingdom
British Antarctic Survey,
1
British Association for the Advancement of Science,
1
,
2
,
3
,
4
British Columbia,
1
Brodholt, John,
1
Brongniart, Adolphe Théodore,
1
Buckland, Raymond,
1
Buddhism,
1
Burma,
1
Bushveld Igneous Province,
1