The Downfall of Uniformitarianism

Creation-Evolution Headlines ^ | 11/04/2003 | Creation-Evolution Headlines

[bondserv]

The Downfall of Uniformitarianism   11/04/2003
Can major paradigm shifts occur in science today?  Check this one out.
    You’ve seen it on TV science programs and in textbooks: plumes of hot magma from deep in the Earth’s mantle rise through the crust and erupt on the surface (the IMAX movie Yellowstone has computer graphics of the whole process).  Perhaps you’ve seen animations of the Hawaiian Islands riding over a “hot spot” and building its chain of volcanoes over millions of years on its slow, drifting journey.  Textbook diagrams show cross-sections of Earth’s crust, with lava erupting from channels rooted deep in the mantle, while crustal plates float and drift atop deep convection currents.
    That’s all defunct now, and so is a lot of the uniformitarian dogma associated with it, claims Warren B. Hamilton (Colorado School of Mines), in an extensive article in this month’s GSA Today.¹  Uniformitarianism is out, catastrophism is in.  Now, don’t get the idea Hamilton denies the Earth is billions of years old; he still accepts the 4.567 billion year figure, the condensation of Earth from a solar nebula, and all that.  But he replaces Charles Lyell’s old premise “the present is the key to the past” with a new picture that seems to pay homage to Stephen Jay Gould.  He calls his model “Punctuated Gradualism.”  How serious is the subject?  Enough for him to entitle his paper, “An Alternative Earth,” and for it to get prominent press in a journal of the world’s leading geological society.
    Here’s the overview Hamilton provides of his paradigm, and the timeline of catastrophic events he now envisions (Note: Ga = giga-annum, i.e., a billion years.  Emphasis added in all quotes):

The Earth described here differs profoundly from that accepted as dogma in most textbooks and research papers.  Crust and upper mantle have formed a mostly closed system throughout geologic time, and their dramatic temporal changes are responses to cooling.  The changing processes define a Punctuated Gradualism and not Uniformitarianism.  Major stages in Earth evolution:

1. 4.567–ca. 4.4 Ga.  Hot accretion and major irreversible mantle fractionation.  Giant bolides continue to ca. 3.9 Ga.
2. 4.4–3.5 Ga.  Era of nearly global felsic crust, too hot and mobile to stand as continents.
3. 3.5–2.0 Ga.  Granite-and-greenstone era.  Permanent hydrosphere.  Old crust cooled to density permitting mafic melts to reach surface.  Diapiric batholiths mobilized from underlying old crust.
4. 2.0 Ga–continuing.  Plate tectonic era.  Distinct continents and oceans.  Top-down cooling of oceanic lithosphere enables subduction that drives plates, forces spreading, and mixes continental as well as oceanic crust into upper mantle.

While much of this timeline looks standard, some of the underlying changes to assumptions are striking.  The rhetoric is also notable in that the new view is revolutionary, and overthrows long-held beliefs about uniformitarianism and plate tectonics.  Notice his confidence in the abstract: “Plumes from deep mantle, subduction into deep mantle, and bottom-up convective drive do not exist.”  In his Overview, he outlines how the old ideas have died:

The conventional model (e.g., Turcotte and Schubert, 2002) of Earth’s evolution and dynamics postulates that most of the mantle is little fractionated, major differentiation continues, and continental crust has grown progressively throughout geologic time; through-the-mantle convection operates, lithosphere plates are moved by bottom-driven currents, and plumes rise from basal mantle to surface; and plate tectonics operated in early Precambrian time.  All of these conjectures likely are false.  They descend from speculation by Urey (1951) and other pioneers, reasonable then but not now, that Earth accreted slowly and at low temperature from fertile chondritic and carbonaceous-chondritic materials, heated gradually by radioactive decay and core segregation, and is still fractionating.

Hamilton explains that “The notion of a cold, volatile-rich, young planet has long since been disproved,” but its corollary of an unfractionated [i.e., homogeneous, and therefore fluid] lower mantle no longer can stand up to the facts; “major constraints” now rule this view out in favor of shallow crustal activity from the upper mantle and crust.  This includes radioactive heating, of which he says, “Earth’s heat loss, now largely of radiogenic heat, is much overstated in the standard model.” He suggests a value 70% the earlier one, and states, “thermodynamic and mineral-physics data require that nearly all radioactivity be above 660 km (Hofmeister and Criss, 2003),” i.e., no deeper than 400 miles.  At that depth there is a discontinuity that could not be breached by a magma plume.
    In short, most volcanic activity and crustal movement is shallow, and plate tectonics started much later than assumed.  What are some of the ramifications geologists will have to consider if Hamilton’s “Alternative Earth” becomes the new textbook orthodoxy?  Some are technical, but here are a few for the casual reader:

• The heat of volcanism is shallow, not deep.  The early crust did not form continents till much later than earlier assumed.
• Plate tectonics began later.  “Plate tectonics did not operate within preserved Archean crust,” Hamilton asserts, and began (in his timeline) at 2.0 Ga.
• Plate tectonics operates differently.  “What drives plates?” he rhetorically asks.  ”Most published models and explanations overlook known plate characteristics and behavior and instead elaborate false assumptions.”  He describes subduction and seafloor spreading as shallow processes, not driven by convection from deep within the mantle.  Notice how he derides those who have fudged their data to argue for deep mantle motions:

  Many published models are misleading: colors are saturated for lower-mantle anomalies one-tenth or one-fifth the amplitude of upper-mantle ones, huge unsampled volumes are assigned average values or populated with spherical-harmonic artifacts, illusory continuity is generated by severe smoothing and sharpening, cross sections are placed where subduction interpretations look most plausible.  Models account for only a few tenths of traveltime variance, and have not been tested by attempting to squeeze solutions back into upper mantle.  Nonsubduction alternatives receive little evaluation.

• No more mantle plumes allowed.  Of the prototypical Hawaiian Islands case, he says, “There, in its only rigorously testable locale, the fixed-plume concept is falsified.”  How do supporters typically respond?  He claims, “Plume advocates respond to such refutations by making their conjectures ever more complex, unique to each example, and untestable.”  Yet beyond this, “All other geochemical, kinematic, and tectonic plume rationales derive from the misinterpretation that Hawaii stands atop a plume.”
• Pure magma cannot reach the surface.  “Pro-plume conjectures assume wrongly that magmas are transported from melting sites to surface without modification, thereby preserving elemental and isotopic ratios of sources,” he chides.  He is emphatic that this assumption is no longer supportable: “Thermodynamics and phase petrology, including cotectic compositions of basalts and presence of underlying cumulates, prove that instead melts are profoundly modified before eruption (O'Hara and Herzberg, 2002).”  Hamilton continues to take opponents to task, accusing them of circular reasoning and flawed methodologies.
• Island chains can form at once.  Rather than growing by drift of plates over hotspots, they form over “crackspots” that allow heat to the surface: “Island alignments, in this view, reflect regional stresses, perpetuation of directions once established, and lithosphere properties.”  Otherwise plume advocates have to explain how the Hawaiian chain made a 60-degree turn.
• Recycled plate slabs are complex.  “Temperature, age, and isotopic ratios of sunken slabs vary regionally.”  What applies hither may not apply thither or yon.
• Plate tectonics is top-down, not bottom-up.  Cooling at the top drives subduction, producing shallow cycles in the upper crust, all happening above 660 km.  It also allows for rotation of plates, impossible under the bottom-up view, which assumed there could be no net rotation: “The no-net-rotation framework minimizes motions of ridges and randomizes motions of subduction hinges so that many roll forward–impossible with gravity drive.  The lack of rational kinematics in these popular frameworks fosters acceptance of mysterious bottom drives,” he says.

These are just a few of the ramifications mentioned by Hamilton.  Other consequences of this “Alternative Earth” with its shallow motions and shallow heating may become evident if the view becomes mainstream, which appears inevitable (see Aug. 20 and Apr. 1 headlines).

---

¹Warren B. Hamilton, “An Alternative Earth,” GSA Today, Vol. 13, No. 11, pp. 4–12.; DOI: 10.1130/1052-5173(2003)013<0004:AAE>2.0.CO;2.

What’s most interesting about this story is not the new model, which may become the next discarded paradigm in the future, but the frank and revealing charges made against proponents of the old model: that they cheated, lied, and used irrational arguments to prop up their beliefs.  Is that possible in science?  You read it right here.
    Creationists have similarly argued against the standard model for a long time and maybe now are getting some comeuppance.  Dr. Walter Brown, for instance, has complained that deep mantle magma plumes are impossible, because the kinematics and thermodynamics would force the channels shut (see his paragraph on volcanoes and lava).  Volcanism, therefore, must occur at shallow depths.
    What can we learn from this paradigm shift?  Make no mistake: confident-sounding scientific models, replete with professional jargon, (maybe even this one here - cf. 11/14/2002 headline), are written by fallible human beings.  Like a hollow idol on a pedestal, a popular theory about the unobservable past might gleam in the sun for awhile, till toppled by tremors of fact.  Broken on the ground, it is swept away and forgotten, and then a new hollow idol takes its place.  Why hollow?  Because no observer was there to corroborate the processes or the vast periods of time they are assumed to take.  Remember Grand Canyon!  It was the prototypical case of a phenomenon requiring millions of years, yet now the consensus is growing that it was formed catastrophically and recently (see 07/22/2002 headline).  It should seem foolish to place one’s faith in the conjectures of mortals instead of in the testimony of an authoritative Eyewitness.
    Those not beholden to secular geological conjectures might well consider what this paradigm shift may do to other geological conjectures.  It may well cause a domino effect on current models in subjects as diverse as radiometric dating (which assumes pristine, unprocessed material from the deep mantle), planetary differentiation, seismology, volcanology, magnetic field dynamo theory, and even the origin of life.  This model tinkers with temperatures, chemistry, the nature of the core and mantle, the timing of continents, and a host of geophysical processes affecting land and sea.  Evolutionists had better revisit their assumptions about the early earth and what this does to their beliefs.
    Now that mantle plumes and deep plate tectonics are out, who knows what will happen next?  Perhaps Hamilton’s shallow plate tectonics theory will topple for other reasons.  It seems to hinder large migrations of plates, such as the belief that India migrated from lower Africa, crashed into Asia and built the Himalayas.  His choice of terms, “punctuated gradualism,” recalls Stephen Jay Gould’s punctuated equilibria, the “Alternative Earth” model in biology.  It arose out of frustration with the lack of evidence for Darwinian gradualism, not because of positive evidence for the alternative.  Gould replaced that “standard model” (neo-Darwinism) with – what? – a new model with even less empirical support, claiming, essentially, that evolution happens so fast it leaves no trace in the fossil record!  Is Hamilton’s “Punctuated gradualism” a parallel in geology?  It seems, at least, to nail the coffin shut on Lyell’s principle of uniformitarianism.  Whatever happens next, we have just seen that major paradigm shifts are still possible in science.  Kuhnians rejoice.  Darwinians beware.

[delapaz]

I would add that what we don't know is far greater than what we do know about the universe. And the more we know, and the harder we look, the wierder the universe gets!

[bondserv]

I am not anti-science, only for the much needed discussion on how to keep science in perspective.

Science has no remedy for my sin problem, and if we allow it to take our focus off of the HOPE provided by our Creator in the historically provable death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, then the enemy has succeeded.

Read between the supernatural lines here folks. No black helicopters here.

1. Confusion over what is good and evil. (Liberals on IRAQ, marriage, Godless behavior accepted and expected...).
2. All semblance of respect out the window. (Current political climate worldwide including the U.S., court appointments, Democrats toward their wartime President...)
3. Israel in the Land despite worldwide hatred. (60% of all UN resolutions are against Israel - a free Democracy).
4. Powderkeg between Islam and Judeo-Christian cultures.

[Right Wing Professor]

Stupid headline. Not everything we know is wrong. All it says is that we haven't found fields sufficient to initiate a lightning strike. We know what lightning is. We know the amplitude of the current.

What an intellectually and spritually bankrupt exercise - to nitpick perhaps the greatest collective human acheivement, because parts of it appear to conflict with a particularly narrow reading of one religion's foundiong documents.

[Right Wing Professor]

I would add that what we don't know is far greater than what we do know about the universe

You don't know that.

[F.J. Mitchell]

Just admitting that God made it all, gives those Science guys an inferority complex, doesn't it?

[delapaz]

your right, it's just a hunch of mine :-)

[bondserv]

Those that do, however, have a constant mental "wedgie".

Go hang out with some non-Christian teens and find out how bad the wedgie the liberal education establishment has pulled on them.

"Science and it's production of technology is the key to peace."
"If we made the goodies we have available to them, they would stop hating us."

They have no concept of a Moral Law giver that can set the absolute standards applicable to all individuals. They falsely believe we have all the answers in and of ourselves. Namely SCIENCE.

Gen 3:4-5
4 And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

[bondserv]

We know what lightning is.

You know you have a finger on your hand too. Explain how you make it move to type "Stupid Headline".

1/10 of 1%, and half of that will be changed down the road.

[bondserv]

Maybe it will, but there's no way to know that from this thing.

Science is fun, and sometimes helpful.

[bondserv]

No. It only suggests that there may have been water present. Perhaps a flood, perhaps a trickle. This, in itself, does not prove "the flood".

The most plausable theory is that in the past water flowed uphill.

[general_re]

I guess. Not the most profound statement we might think of, but you probably won't find too many who disagree with you, either ;)

[bondserv]

Could the New Inquisition Priesthood just save a lot of bandwith if they all group-signed one post that says "Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain"?

If God wasn't Christian, he might file suit for copyright infringement.

[bondserv]

I guess. Not the most profound statement we might think of, but you probably won't find too many who disagree with you, either ;)

I am glad you exhibit perspective my friend. We could dish up some humble pie, trouble is getting them to eat.

[Consort]

It looks like Catastrophism is nothing more than a term used to describe selective geological events that are part of an overall Uniformitarianism.

[bondserv]

9-11 was a non-linearity that upsets scientists, but was expected by those believing in the supernatural.

Correction, not all scientists are natural materialists.

[Consort]

The creation of the Universe was non-linear, as are much of quantum mechanics.

And we created the observable universe under quantum mechanics (Copenhagen Theory?).

[bondserv]

And we created the observable universe under quantum mechanics (Copenhagen Theory?).

I think, therefore I observe. The ability to think was imbued non-linearly.

Gen 1:26
26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

Gen 2:7
7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

[Consort]

The universe was probably imagined into existence...just like everything else.

[Consort]

...and, does non-linearity have a linearity of its own or is it merely an anomaly within linearity?