[SunkenCiv]

:')

• When impact craters on Earth weren't considered, impact structures were called cryptovolcanic in origin
• lunar craters were considered volcanic in origin
• in the 1950s Shoemaker et al began to identify impact structures
• project Apollo landed a geologist on the Moon who found that impact is the dominant force at work on the lunar surface
• late 1970s the Alvarez theory arose
• 1990 Chicxulub was identified as the impact crater
• 1994 the comets resulting from the breakup of SL-9 crashed one after the other into Jupiter and left scars bigger than the Earth, despite pooh-poohs from so-called skeptics that anything would happen
• since 1994, some volcanologists have started to claim that Mars' surface resulted from volcanism rather than impact

And yet, there's a drive on to crush secular catastrophism because it dumps Natural Selection on its ass, in a philosophical sense. In a few minutes or hours someone will arrive and claim that it doesn't or it can't, or that gradualism has always included catastrophic events, or that the only documented catastrophe is the flood event that created the Channeled Scablands, or some other such nonsense.

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

They have a 2 hour special on the Discover Channel, which discusses evolution before the Age of Dinosaurs. It runs from 8 to 10 pm tonight and is a repeat. At about 9:30 it will talk about a non-impact theory for the great Permian extinction.

[grey_whiskers]

G.K. Chesterton in his book The Wisdom of Father Brown (originally published in 1929) had as a side topic in one of his short stories the concept of "catastrophism" which seems to touch on this...

"Thus, when a very unobtrusive Oxford man named John Boulnois wrote in a very unreadable review called the Natural Philosophy Quarterly a series of articles on alleged weak points in Darwinian evolution, it fluttered no corner of the English papers; though Boulnois’s theory (which was that of a comparatively stationary universe visited occasionally by convulsions of change) had some rather faddy fashionableness at Oxford, and got so far as to be named “Catastrophism.”"

Cheers!