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welcome you to the Chaos and >> Clint Sprott: I'd like to
Those of you who have been Complex Systems Seminar.
know our speaker today, attending rJim Blair.ndoubtedly
He's been a regular attendee and
seminar for a number of years. active participant in the
of Wisconsin in physical His PhD is from the University
He had a number of careers, as chemistry in 1963.
his main occupation was a hprofessor of physical sciences
at Milton College.
from that institution and with He's now an emeritus professor
His topic will be the structure of scientific revolution.
Jim.
by explaining who I am. And then a little later, I'll
explain my connection to the
I came here in 1958 as a story that I'll be telling you.
Science Foundation scholarship graduate student on a National
Ended up with a PhD inform 1963. in chemistry.
molecular weight of My tmacromolecules using the the
analytical ultracentrifuge. My first job was at DuPont Photo
Products in Parlin, New Jersey, on photographic, silver halide
chemistry basically, for two
Then I didn't like New Jersey and I moved back to Madison to
teach at Milton College.
curriculum, but before long, and I began to teach the chemistry
teaching geology, astronomy, as you'll see, I ended up
courses, one semester, oceanography, a series of short
of short topics that were active one month on each of the number
like decoding the genetic code, which was a big deal at that
time, animal behavior, because
the Nobel Prize in studying Konrad animal behavior.gotten
I also taught a course in science fiction, one of the
first in the country actually,
fiction writers come to visit and had the course. science
Out of the oceanography class they instituted the calendar,
the 4-1-4 calendar with the month of January as a one-month
semester, and somebody on the board of trustees said how can
you teach oceanography if you don't have an ocean and what am
I going to do during January, that was my other problem.
So I put those two problems together to spend January taking
groups of students down to the
Research Station to study the Virgin Islocean.cological
And in conjunction with that, I got an open water diving scuba
certification.
I came in contact, and I can't My first free summer at Milton,
Gobind Khorana at the Enzyme remember exactly how, with Har
And he was making artificial DNA Institute.
But he wanted to know how big his molecules were, and he had
access to an analytical ultracentrifuge.
So measuring the size of
ultracentrifuge, I know how to molecules, analytical
So I got hired as a summer do that.
able to stay on during the free prtime that I have during theas
academic year from Milton, and
up with a Nobel Prize being thigiven in medicine in 1968.ed
I don't know how anybody figured
connected with medicine but when that what we were doing was
off to MIT but I stayed on here and then worked with David Green
and Henry Lardy running the analytical ultracentrifuge doing
proteins of various kinds,
proteins and botulinum toxin mitochondrial structural
Well Milton College closed and I protein.
So at that point I got employed by what was then called Raltech
which later became Hazleton.
laboratory doing miscellaneous That was a contract research
But the most interesting thing I research things.
developing a series of ended up doing there was
to predict the environmental laboratory procedures in order
They spray these things out over fade of agricultural chemicals.
insecticides, pesticides, acres aherbicides. ground,
What happens to them? How are they transformed and how
are they transported and can
laboratory procedures. that be predicted from
able to switch over to the But after five years there I was
Lab which is a subdivision of the State Laboratory of Hygiene.
And my projects there, I was
analysis. Industrial hygienists go arounde
to workplace environments,
the country and mail their factories, office spaces, around
analyzed for the various kinds samples here to Madison to be
have to compare with OSHA of pollutastandards.hey might
And at the end we were even getting samples from Europe and
from South America. I retired from that 2006.
So, as I look back over my
diversity. career what I see is a lot of
different areas and not much I've had experience in a lot of
I was never really an expert in anything except for the
analytical ultracentrifuge and
Okay, the talk today is going to that was 40 years ago.
Part one, the structure of have three distinct parts.
it that new ideas become adopted scientific revolutions or how is
As kind of a specific application of that, how the
idea of drifting continents was transformed from a very fringe
idea in science, sort of ranked along with Atlantis and maybe
ancient aliens and flying saucers to become what's now the
central core of modern geology. And then the third part, which I
hope we have plenty of time to
speculative, the first two parts get to, is somewhat more
straightforward recitation of I thihistory.retty
The third part is a lot of
controversial because a lot of speculation and probably more
I'll talk more about that when it is my own speculation, and so
Okay, for the beginning, when I first came to Madison in 1958 I
remember the elderly faculty
when they were having such a talking about the earlier days
ions to be accepted. hard time getting the concept of
apparently was very resistant Thto the idea of ions.ty
Now ions had first been proposed
but it was really Svante by Michael Faraday in the 1830s,
thesis in 1884 and utilized the Arrheniidea of ions.into his
And the skepticism went from, I overheard the comment like
around here we call him Erroneous Arrhenius and does he
think that there are dog ions that chase those cat ions
around. And even in the popular press
there was skepticism about ions.
Devil's Dictionary. QIt has an entry talking about's
under molecules.
little unit of matter. Molecule: the ultimate invisible
corpuscule, which is also the ultimate invisible little unit
of matter, and by its close resemblance to the atom, also
the ultimate invisible little unit of matter.
And then it says the three great
structure of the universe are scthe molecular and thethe
corpuscular and the atomic. The present trend of the
scientific thought is towards the theory of ions.
Ions differ from the molecule,
that they are ions. Well, had he said in that they
are electrically charged he maybe would have been on to
something.
become vanquished, how did Anyway, how did this resistance
Well, the theory that I heard from the faculty members was not
that the idea or data or logic
skeptics, but rather that one by changed the minds of the
were replaced by younger faculty one the skeptics retired and
with the idea of ions. members that were comfortable
succession model. The alternative model which was
published in 1962, Thomas Kuhn's
Scientific Revolutions," book called "The Structure of
And his idea or his model is is the paradigm shift.
world view, structure, he called there's an existing theory,
the observations in a field that it a paradigm, and it explains
But over time more observations are made, maybe expanding the
range, new instrumentations, new
of the results of these new ideas don't really fit very well
with the existing paradigms.
anomalies. So they're referred to as
people adjust to them, but when enough anomalies begin to buildd
up, then people begin to
And eventually when there's sufficient number of anomalies,
think of like pressure building up along a fault line or
something, then there is a
paradigm shift to the new paradigm which explains all of
the old observations but also the anomalies that have occurred
since.
I'll describe these as the top So that's the paradigm shift.
almost, build up. oAs opposed to the second which
corresponds to like a rapid dramatic shift.
Or you can think of it in terms of the tortoise and the hare.
I come back to this idea of distinguishing between slow
gradual versus rapid transitions
Okay, drifting continents and Alfred Wegener.
He was the first to propose the idea that the continents had
moved around. He was a meteorologist, which
probably didn't help his
community, but everybody knew that the earth's structure was a
dark, dense basaltic sphere with
colored granitic rocks floating on top of it, sitting on top of
it. And it was a thought that there
really wasn't any force large enough to push these continents
around. So they were assumed to just be
locked in place.
anomalies that are associated But thewith that.ber of
The shape of Africa and South America, every grade school kid
when they look at the globe notices that those continents
look like they could fit
Geologically there's a number of together.
side of the Atlantic looks places where the geology on each
And then of course the famous ring of fire.
The Pacific basin which has deep
lots of earthquakes forming a trencvery definite pattern. and
So as, for example, Brazil
there, further south Argentina obviously would like to fit
Africa. This is just looking the coast
line. On the geological matches, you
have the Cabot Fault up here in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick area,
and over here on the other side you have the Great Glen Fault in
Scotland. And the geology of these two is
very similar. The age of the rocks, the
structure of the rocks. They kind of look like they
ought to go together except of
ocean in between. coHere is the rim of fire.c
This is where earthquakes occur.
definite pattern. And you have the deep trenches
of the Pacific over here, and these are like, what, seven
times as deep as the Grand
the equivalent of New York to Canyon anKansas City.e running
They have mountains, they're
and volcanoes and earthquakes. always associated with mountains
trenches, mountains, volcanoes, And liearthquakes. here,
In standard geology,
really just no good explanation. pre-paradigm shift, there was
people learned to pass exams. They couldn't really offer an
explanation for why it was that way.
Then there's the tropical reef
here, these are the butterfly fish,fish of the Caribbean. you
If you've done any snorkeling or
you may recognize these fish. Four-eye butterfly fish looks,
like he's trying to go the other
Notice the size and the shape of way.
They're relatively small. They all have these little
mouths. They feed off of coral and
little detritus that sticks to
But they have a very the rocks.
The colors are all different. And the thing that's unusual,.
not just about butterfly fish but about tropical fish in
general, is that from all the tropical oceans they all look
very much alike.
of the Red Sea, for example. Here would be the butterfly fish
mouth. You notice the same size, shape
way they feed. Same behavior patterns, the same
halfway around the world. And now can these fish just like
swim back and forth across the
looks? ocean to maintain their similar
These guys cannot swim across large bodies of water like the
Atlantic ocean, for example, to get from the Red Sea or the
Mediterranean or over to the
So how did they do it? Caribbean.
long speculated, and of course Well, marine biologists have
evolution, that if you have a lot of species that look very
similar to each other, they like
sort of a common ancestor at to think that there was some
And they speculated something scalled the test sea..
A hypothetical worldwide
butterfly fish, and I could have tropical ocean from which the
model for angel fish, for example, or any of the various
tropical fish.
The similarity between the Groupers.
oceans around the world is just tropone of those kind ofious
coincidences or anomalies, no explanation for it.
So, tropical fish in the test sea.
And now another anomaly was the fossils of Mesosaurus.
He's a lizard-like guy who only lived in two places in the
world.
him in two places: South America And we'll only find fossils for
And the only way by the standard and Africa.
these two places would be to go all the way up to North America
and around across the Bering Sea
Siberia and they didn't leave and come aany fossils.own across
So they assume, and nobody
to the Challenger expedition in rea1872 there was very littleor
understanding of what the undersea world was like, what
the sea floor looks like. So they postulated that there
must be some kind of a land bridge that connects these two
because nobody had done, but as soundings began to come in
determining what the undersea looks like, nobody found any
land bridges. And the more they did soundings
and not find it, the narrower the land bridges had to become
to fit between the places where they'd done the measurements
until eventually they became so skinny that the Mesosaurus would
practically have to tight rope
Now, as more data comes in, you get data on the fit of the
continental shelves, and instead
Atlantic, you start finding a omountain ridge, for example.e
I'll talk about those two for a moment.
If instead of plotting the shore
here, you plot the edge of the line, which is the lighter line
depth of about 900 meters, the continental shelf, which is the
under water appears to part of continents, a lot of what's
just the continental shelf. tIt's continental rock, gritty's
type rock, not the basaltic sea floor type of rock.
This just happens to be flooded because the sea level is sort of
high now, but if the sea level
begin to see what the continents dropped a little bit, you'd
here becomes almost incredibly actually looked like and the fit
You see where it's overlapped or close to be a coincidence.
the edge of the continental tshelf rather than the watere
line, the fit of the continents is pretty hard to pass off as
just coincidence as it had been before.
And instead of finding these
mountain range that splits, almost winds around between the
two continents on this side and something similar over in the
Pacific.
the anomalies are starting to become too big to ignore but
still the idea of drifting
the idea of what force could be constrong enough to push the by
continents around.
mountains and find that there were marine fossils up in theb
mountains, and in fact there are
the highest mountain, you have marine fossils on the tops of
for that. tOf course way back before theon
1800s the explanation for the shape of the land was a single
cataclysmic event.
shall we say, biblical A great worldwide flood of,
for shaping the land. And of course that would give an
explanation for why you might marine fossils on the tops of
mountains.
geologists were promoting the idea of uniformitarianism.
There's gradual changes taking
than single catastrophic or placecataclysmic events.rather
So they came up with something
Now, at this point I'll introduce my connection to this
story.
Milton it was to teach chemistry When I started teaching down in
of years, the word that was that but very soon, the first couple
geology was going to retire. the professor who was teaching
interested in teaching geology, Andand I said sure, the only be
problem is I don't know anything
But other than that, yeah, I'll be glad to teach it.
But they were going to teach it one more time before the other
guy was going to teach one more time before he retired.
So I thought I'll sit in on his class.
And as it turned out, Milton
over 100 years, but this was the college had been in business for
taught under the old paradigm and the next year when I taught
it was the first time it was
I was right there at the taught in the new paradigm.
to speak. paSo I sat in on the class andso
very much of it was perfectly appropriate no matter what.
They had a lot of nice field
it's right at the edge of the trips in theglacier.area because
So I could go and find out where
the eskers were. the drumlins and the kettles and
Glen which is a fantastic place Wto take a geology field trip.'s
And of course we had a lot of lab stuff, looking through thin
sections of rocks with
and identifying lots of minerals microscopes and polarized light
But when we got to the part about the marine fossils on the
tops of the mountains I heard an
theory and it just didn't sound explavery plausible to me.cline
I was pondering over that when
other classes said, Dr. Blair, I one of the students in one of my
geology next year. hear you're going to be teaching
to take it? AAnd he said, no I already took
it last year at, it was Cornell or some prestigious school.
He was a transfer student.
why there are marine fossils on And the tops of mountains. me
And he went through exactly the same geosyncline theory that I
heard in the class at Milton so I figured that's got to be the
story then because if you get to
a prestigious school like Cornell it's not like Milton is
out of the loop here. And the explanation is basically
just that the sea floor is
there's concave area that's an concave, that's the geosyncline,
die and leave fossils on the ocean, and the marine creatures
becomes a mountain. And I said why does it become a
mountain? And they said well, nobody
knows.
shrinking and causes it to come Maybe it's becup.e the earth is
And I said the sea floor is generally basalt and how come
the mountains are mostly
Anyway that was the theory and granite?
well with anything else. it just didn't seem to fit very
showed and that I saw in the There's a very good film that I
Land. It must have been made in the
early 1960s right before this paradigm shift, and it's really
an excellent film, but it incorporates the whole idea of
uniformitarianism.
explained as the present is the key to the past or to find out
how things happened in the past,
in the world. lSo this movie is presumablyay
showing what happened over
of the US west, not too far from millions of years in some area
of the layers in the Grand the Grand Canyon because a lot
So they'd say at one time it was Canyon were used to explain.
But then they went to the Bahamas to film a shallow sea.
And then at a later time it was desert dunes.
So they went to the Sahara
They put those together. Desert to film dunes.
It's to know how things were in the past, you'd look around to
see how things are today and
places are like they are today. And they could assume in this
movie that practically
geography, this piece of real everyestate, has changed.ce of
It's been sea floor and it's
forests. been desert and it's before
change is the latitude and the About the only thing that can't
But everything else has been longitude.
But then the movie ends up by talking about what to predict
from the age of the sea floor because it's well known that the
rocks on land get pushed up and pushed down and eroded and
become sedimentary rocks. So the earth was known to be
like four and a half billion
land, and particularly in and around the Grand Canyon, weren't
nearly that old.
of the Grand Canyon are only In fact the rocks at the bottom
roughly half the age of the about two bearth. years old,
In fact, the story is that when an ranger in the Grand Canyon
Park is explaining that the rocks at the bottom of the Grand
Canyon are only two billion years old, one of the tourists
sticks up his hand and says actually they're two billion and
forty-two years old.
and forty-two, how do you know And the ranger says, two billion
He said, well, 42 years ago I came out here to the Grand
Canyon and the ranger said that the rocks were two billion years
old then. I thought this was appropriate
here. This is usually the story I tell
when we're introducing the idea of significant figures, but it
seemed to fit here too. Okay, the movie ends up by
saying when we drill down through the sediments on the sea
floor, which really hadn't been done yet, we would expect to
find the oldest rocks on earth
basaltic dense thing that the continents are sitting on top
of. The continents are doing their
churning but the sea floor
by this. presumably is not being affected
oldest rocks, four billion years So we should expect to find the
solidified, oldest rocks on the or whenevsea floor.th first
When they started drilling
the sea floor, what they found through and finding the rocks on
opposite. The rocks on the sea floor are
younger than any other rocks. The oldest rocks on the sea
floor are only about 200 million
you're a geologist and you years which sounds old unless
five percent of the age of the realize that that's only roughly
And furthermore, the oldest sea floor rocks are up near the edge
of the continent and the
this mid-ocean ridge, the rocks youget progressively younger.rds
Now this should have been enough
that something was happening of a tip off to make them think
But no. Before we get to the final blow
to the conventional static
you about what the poles do. continents model, I have to tell
probably know. The earth has four poles, as you
No, no. There's magnetic north and true
north, and then there's magnetic
True north is sometimes called south and true south.
north. geologic north or geographic
The axis the earth rotates It's the spin axis.
If you laid on your back on true around, that's true north.
the same star above of all the north all year round, you'd see
doing a very, very tight little timcircle, probably hardlyris,
measurable. Or in Antarctica if you laid on
your back year round, you'd see the center of the southern cross
year round. The earth rotates around that
axis. But magnetic north is the
compasses point.
somewhere, one theory was the Acompasses point north becauseor
there's a big load of iron ore
attracts them. up there that's magnetic and
compasses point north, they Idon't exactly point northy
because true north and magnetic north are not exactly aligned.
And the maps, boy scouts, when
compasses, there's a correction factor on the map that corrects
between true and magnetic north.
things. On a long time scale, how do you
know what the poles are doing anyway?
Well, when lava, when there's a volcanic eruption and lava flows
out, little particles of
with the earth's magnetic field because it's a liquid and they
line up the same way compasses
So when there's a recent point north.
needles are all pointing towards volcanic eruption, those little
If you turn the clock back a magnetic north.
million years, over that time as long time, in this case 500
north pole appears to have seen from North America, the
millions of years out to some place down by the equator over
there in the middle of the
edge of the Pacific ocean. Pacific ocean, near the eastern
class that I was going to at And so it was taught in the
500 million years ago was down Milton about how the north pole
ocean. by the equator in the Pacific
of the students raised the I was a little disappointed none
pole left the true north pole quand wandered out here or didh
both poles move out into the
The assumption seemed to be that Pacific ocean?
earth's spin axis was also it was both poles, that the
but nobody really, we had really aligned with the magnetic pole
The story gets worse because no direct data on that.
Siberia started doing the same when geologists in Europe and
where the north pole was, they kinds of studies, orienting
They had the north pole, as seen were getting a different answer.
ago, over here. So you have the north pole in
two different places 500 million
you're living in North America years ago depending upon whether
And by golly, even that didn't or Europe.
paradigm of the fixed continents seem to be enough to destroy the
problem of overcoming the question of what can push the
continents around.
pole does is it flips. Well the other thing that the
out there what I mean is a pole When I saidmoved out. pole moved
Sometimes north, sometimes
The movement of the pole that I was showing is a very, very slow
kind of thing.
standpoint, very rapid. Black means the north pole
magnetic aligned the way it is
compasses, instead of pointing right now, and white means the
south. north, would be pointing exactly
would be pointing north. The tail end of the compass
They're not gray. There is no measurements on any.
of the lava flows where the pole
directly either north or south. This is all very modern type ofn
thing before the poles have wandered down to the equator.
Very relatively frequent, very
The poles are sort of bi-stable. rapid flips.
that they flip flop back and They have two stable positions
spending a long time with one orientation and sometimes a
rather short time and not very
And last thing on this graph to point out is this is the
Cretaceous, this is 65 million
And this is the boundary years ago.
K-T boundary because this whole beset of epics was called thethe
Tertiary. So K for Cretaceous, T for
Tertiary, the K-T boundary. Very important boundary in
geology and I'll have more to say about it later.
More recently people have been
Cretaceous-Paleocene boundary. trying to rename it is the
K-P something. Instead of K-T it then becomes
for 65 million years, I don't know why they want to change it
now.
expressed the other way. But anyway, you sometimes see it
boundary in the last section. IFinally the thing that did inis
the existing geological paradigm
looking as they developed kind was these pole flips because
could drag from a ship just along above the surface alongy
the bottom of the ocean and measured the magnetization
orientation of the iron inside
And what they found was a symmetrical pattern.
This is the current orientation for these lavas on either side
of this is the mid-ocean ridge, that mountain range we saw, but
then reverse polarization,
almost exactly equally spaced, reverse flip, equally spaced, or
And notice the patterns are just either side of the rift.
the rift. Now this was just too much to
accept as coincidence.
this paradigm of fixed Finally it comes through that
There was still the question of conwhat can push it though.ue.
There were papers written in
1960s, some people say that it's Scientific American in the early
pushes this. the lava squirting up here that
reasonable. It's like trying to push a rug
across the room by trying to
It wouldn't happen. pIt would crumple..
Another paper said it's the weight of the sediments.
You have all these sediments
down and they're pulling on it, and even if you combine pulling
on this end from the sediment weight and pushing on this end
with the lava extrusion you still don't get a very likely
picture of what can be
But if you accept the idea of this moving it does explain a
lot of the things that we saw before.
Why are there marine sediments
Well because this was the sediment and as the plate moved
it got pushed up and made a mountain.
Why are there volcanoes next to deep trenches?
There's a deep trench, there's
But what can power it? mountains and volcanoes.
fluid, this is a melted fluid. Well, of course, this is a
Roughly the temperature of the It's very hot.
You can see that when volcanic surface of the sun.
same color, bright orange layellowy, almost like the sunhe
which means it's pretty much the
But it circulates because heat same temperature of the sun.
in contact with the cold ocean is being lost here as it comes
So if heat's being lost and heat's being generated down
here, you'd expect the fluid to flow.
And so the model that you have
exactly being pushed through the now is the continents are not
a conveyor belt, they're riding basaltic lithon it.e, it's like
The whole system is being powered, well what generates all
the heat down here of course is radio activity.
You have a lot of uranium in the
radioactive decay of isotopes earth like that.m and
They generate heat. So basically the thing that
powers the movement of the
We got nuclear powered continents is atomic energy.
And once this became accepted, continents moving.
the context of the current the final comment on it is in
just reading somebody who was gsaying you can't believe whats
those scientists say because
geology they told me the when I was in college and I took
move. cNow the scientists are sayingt
the continents are moving around
Those scientists don't stick to all their story.ce.
They're a bunch of flip floppers.
You can't believe what they say.
If I reconstruct, accepting now that continents are moving
around and I reconstruct where
sure enough there was a tworldwide tropical sea for all,
of the ancient ancestors of the butterfly fish and the angel
fish and all to have been living
separated they separate from here and as the continents get
into the closely related similar each other then they diversify
right now. kinds of species that we see
Dialectics. Friedrich Engels proposed this
idea of dialectics which was if you have two conflicting things,
a thesis and an antithesis, that
into a synthesis. Engels, if you're not familiar
with the name, is usually associated with Marx.
Marx and Engels are like
Names that go together. And dialectics was usually named
in the context of dialectical materials.
And Engels was really talking more about the social classes or
something but I'm applying it here, too.
We have the original idea of
top part of it here. geology, we'll just look at the
Originally it was a single This is the geology part.
the land, the great flood. cataclysmic event that shaped
uniformitarianism, gradual That was replaced by
Time changes the land. change over eons of time.
and continuously. GraBut cataclysmic events gotrm
revitalized with the recognition
65 million years ago there was that at this K-T boundary
event, an asteroid collision. And I was going to go into an
explanation of all the evidence that supports that but I
realized that would be a whole
So I have to say that it was other lecture.
scientific community that in quickly accepted by the
impact. The first skeptical response to
it was, gee it's too much of a
asteroid would just happen to chit at the transition pointan
between two geological epics. Until you realize that you're
thinking about it exactly backwards.
The asteroid didn't just happen to hit at this transition, the
asteroid caused the transition
When I first begin, this was in the 1980s, they first.
popularized the idea of dinosaurs being wiped out.
The Cretaceous was the age of the dinosaurs, and the one above
it is the age when mammals first
When they first begin to accept the idea that dinosaurs were
basically wiped out by an asteroid, there was a very
interesting little cartoon thing
shows, or maybe it was "Saturday on one of the late night talk
dinosaur singing his little song, I love you and you love me
or whatever it is, and then a big rock comes and hits him on
the head. And that's how the dinosaurs
were wiped out by an asteroid.
I thought that's too dramatic. When I first heard that
uniformitarianism. I was programmed to think
a lot of dust which would cool The asteroid probably kicked up
would have a harder time the earth and then the dinosaurs
and it would slowly, over eons adjusting to the cooler climate
to the mammals that were warm of time, losblooded. competition
No, no, no. Barney getting bonked on the
head was probably the closer
crater for the asteroid impact model, because as they found a
of Yucatan, it's a rather large crater and that is a very largef
asteroid. So people starting figuring how
much energy is a large asteroid going to impart to the earth.
And it turns out it's a lot.
hit, it presumably kicked up And in fact when the asteroid
re-entered all around the world as meteor showers, and all of
these are generating heat.
that there was enough heat being And their calculations indicated
asteroid impact to raise the generated as a result of the
up to around a thousand degrees sufor a short period of time.rth
Now that's blast furnace
Like putting the earth in a blast furnace for a period of
weeks maybe, days, hours at least.
And of course the dinosaurs lived on the surface.
So it's very likely that all of the dinosaurs on earth were dead
within a few hours of that
And of course the vegetation asteroid impact.
They did a test by going to San Antonio and using a blast
furnace to put in the kind of soil, the kind of plants, the
kind of things that they thought
course the plants were all existed at the time and of
Do you have a question? bNo? Okay..
So presumably the dinosaurs were
catastrophic, catastrophic for literally wiped out in one
be good for us, catastrophic them, it actually turned out to
How did the little mammals, mammals at that time were little
burrowing things like shrews and
have survived? mice and such, how could they
they found from the San Antonio experiment is if you're very far
under the surface of the earth, even a few inches, you could
probably survive it.
It didn't penetrate soil. TheSoil is fairly temperatureg.
resistant.
survive. Burrowing animals could probably
they going to eat? Well when they came out what are
dinosaur meat around all over Well they the place.f roasted
They were omnivores.
roasted dinosaur until such a Theytime as the plants wouldt on
recover.
recover from a massive worldwide How long does a take plants to
Not very long. fire?
from the say the forest fire in Yellowstone Park a few years
ago, the plants snap back fairly
A lot of the prairie grasses quickly.
come right back the next year. have deep roots, and they'll
the asteroid impact, the dust, The cooling effect right after
Fahrenheit blast furnace you go from a thousand degrees
freezing temperatures for a while, well that just preserves
the dinosaur meat for the little
back. mamPresumably that's how theyrow
survived. And that was now the accepted
idea that this is bringing back the idea of cataclysmic events.
Well, go back one, do I have
Notice the scale here looks aquite different than the first?
one I showed you, and this is because this is scaling it in a
linear fashion. This is like the four and a half
billion year age of the earth and this is proportionately, you
see the asteroid impact is right
compared to the age of the earth here, that's pretty modern times
get the idea of an asteroid used because sometimes people would
when it was first forming and to when they hit the moon andago
things and it doesn't happen
Well, looking on this scale, a anymore.
major asteroid impact, that's meactually relatively recent. a
If it's happened fairly recently, maybe it will be
happening again sometime soon.
didn't have enough things to Something to worry, if you
Now, the last section-- >> How many other times did
it happen?
think anybody really knows. A mere 65 million years ago the
crater was still detectable.
impacts all the time like the Of couone out in Arizona.meteor
But I'm talking about a really
Presumably none since. catastrophic one.
in 1908 that knocked down a few Thtrees and maybe killed a fewia
people and cows, but fortunately
So I'm talking the kind of it didn't hit over a major city.
events apparently don't happen, rmay have happened a lot back
here but not in the last
we're due for another one. 65 million years but maybe
revived the idea of cataclysmic Now, jump events., this has
This was clearly a cataclysmic
This trumps a worldwide flood. event.
when old theories die sometimes they come back like zombies and
have a second life. So we have uniformitarianism and
cataclysmic events, both acting,
both together like Engels wanted apparently now, so you put them
both. to dLet's call it punctuatedhave
equilibrium.
there's gradual transitions over The time changes the land,
often there is a cataclysmic long epics of time but every so
that long uniformitarian change. event that's superimposed upon
and I'm going to apply this same Now we come to the last part,
creationism. dialectic idea to evolution and
creationism was the theory. God created the world and then
he created all the animals on the fourth or fifth day.
And each individual species was created independently and out of
nothingness, so to speak. When I grew up, I was in Kansas
City in the 1950s, although I didn't actually take a high
school biology class, I picked
not sure where, but I came away with a complete misconception of
what evolution was all about. I thought that it was like this
uniformitarianism thing.
time. Animals were selected out to fit
into their environment and this adaptation took place slowly,
gradually.
for this, the examples that were And the evidence that was given
sense. given to me seemed to make
England. One of them was the moths in
Back before the Industrial Maybe you've heard this story.
were white, mostly. ReA black moth would stand outd
against the pristine environment
With the Industrial Revolution and get eaten by birds.
the air, the environment turned ablack and all the sudden beingo
black if you're a moth became an
So the population of moths advantage.
moths, and the white moths were shithe ones that were gettingack
eaten.
Thatcher took England off a Then coal-based economy andaret
transformed it over to an oil-based economy, not so much
because she was an
clean up the environment they would say but because she wanted
to break the coal miners union, but for whatever reason the
effect was to transform England back to this pristine days when
white moths had the advantage because the environment was much
cleaner, black moths stood out. And this was given as an example
of evolution. Also, antibiotic resistant
bacteria like tuberculosis that are immune to penicillin.
If penicillin is around, the
survive. ones that are immune to it
evolution. And this is example of
the horses. ABack a few million years ago
horses were primarily little
And then, and I had this wrong dog-sized animals.
horses were better adapted to ithe environment, maybe becauser
they could outrun saber tooth tigers or whatever.
So the bigger horses survived and their offspring were bigger
yet and over the years horses got bigger and bigger until they
looked like the modern horse. I thought this right up until I
heard a lecture by Stephen Jay
Memorial Union's auditorium Gould in thethere. over in the
And he set me straight. Looking at the fossil records,
it's more like creationism
A species appears suddenly in the fossils.
It's never been there before. It appears.
It exists in the fossil for umpteen million years,
10 million, five million, however long, and then it goes
extinct and it's not there
And a new species appears. anymore.
appear. And I thought my God that'sf
creationism.
political correctness reasons. You don't dare call it that for
are not the children of those And these hhorses.these horses
These are separate species that each one of which just appears
in the fossil records and some
time. They coexisted at the same time.
So how do we get gradual
much in a gradual kind of thing, changes, mutations occur pretty
substituted for another one, one base pair at a time being
change giving rise to rapid, how do we get slow, gradual
transitions like from one what species to another?ysmic
Well, here is just to show a few
How do you tell one species from animals.
Well if they're around and you another anyway?
looks different from a cow, cathat's how you can tell therse
difference. But that's not necessarily a
very good guide when you think
This guy, you might say he's a about it.
No he's not, actually, he's a kwallaby.
It's a separate species.
you just go by looks you can be He looks lideceived.aroo, but if
And this guy, he looks like a llama, doesn't he?
Well he looks like a llama but
He's an alpaca. Just because two things look
alike doesn't necessarily mean
On the other hand, you take things like dogs.
You've got a Pekingese and a
a Great Dane and a St. Bernard, Chthey don't look veryot
much alike. I think anybody who wasn't
familiar with dogs and didn't know anything about them would
not necessarily recognize a Great Dane as being the same
species as being a Pekingese. They look more different than an
alpaca and a llama to me. Or to take the example of
elephants.
an elephant. Say I went to the zoo and I saw
elephant was it? And I say, what kind of an
blank stare to that. And a lot of people will give a
that there are two distinctly Thespecies of elephants.nize
And just off hand, if you walked
saw an elephant, would you out on the street today and you
Indian? rHow many people would know ther
difference if they saw them?
I guess I would have expected a little more than that.
When I see the GOP icon symbol
that they understand the on television, that's not clear
a generic elephant. It isn't clearly identifiable as
African or Asian. >> They don't believe in
evolution.
So anyway elephants, >> Yeah, maybe.
that look enough alike two distinctly different species
don't even notice that there are apparently that a lot of people
If you know what to look for, it's pretty obvious to tell them
apart.
llama, since I'm not very familiar with either of those,
what I'll say is alpacas and
America, and wallabies and llamas both live in South
Australia. kangaroos both come from
tend to look like the species Sothat are around them but yetdo
they're different.
transition? SoWell, lately a lot ofhis
information has been learned
So I'll go back, this is my schematic diagram of a genome,
and I'll comment that decoding
big project. the human genome was really a
or the Manhattan Project It was like going to the moon,
It took 10 years. It was actually projected to
take 15 years; it only took 10. It cost $3 billion.
Now just two months ago in
of that size can have its genome September, I looked up a mammal
a cost of $50,000. determined today in two weeks at
$2 billion project to a two week So we've gone from a 10 year
And one of the things we've learned about the genome, and
what's the genome?
One of the surprising things was Well it's the genes.
genes. that most of the genome is not
of bases that codes for the Andproduction of a particularce
protein.
of the genome is actually genes, Only somewhere around 2% to 4%
dismissed as junk DNA. and the other 98% to 96% was
would we invest so much of our And people were saying, gee, why
doesn't do anything? genetic material into junk that
isn't really junk after all. Well, it turns out this junk
This is my symbol for a gene. This would be a sequence of base
pairs in the DNA that codes for the production of a protein.
But these genes get switched on and off.
And there are sequences within
switch genes off and on. the genome that simply serve to
have to be switches because the Asame enzymes that you need ate
different times of development
You need something but then you don't want it anymore.
Something has to turn that gene off.
Take, for example, when people
was of no disadvantage, it lived in Africa having dark skin
When people moved into northern proEurope, however, dark skine.
became a disadvantage because vitamin D deficiency becomes a
problem.
sunlight and you want light skin You're not getting enough
So people made the transition from dark skin to light skin,
the people who moved into northern Europe, by turning off
some of the genes that make melanin, the skin color.
Now, like our black and white moths, white skin and black skin
were the same species.
contrary, it's not a different Some racist opinions to the
some of these genes on and off. spOr take lactose tolerance orh
lactose intolerance.
Africa and they sent them powdered milk which sounded like
a good idea, they didn't realize
Africa do not metabolize that a lot of the people in
And the word I heard was they don't have the gene metabolize
lactose.
true. Everybody when they're an infant
can metabolize lactose or they
They eat their mother's milk. So what happens is that that
gene to metabolize lactose, to
lactose gets switched off. make lactase and to metabolize
has access to milk from a Idomesticated animal, that's not
big deal. Cultures that have domesticated
animals that produce milk, they preserve the ability to
metabolize lactose into adulthood because they have that
as a milk source, as a food source for them.
So people who domesticate cattle
maintain the ability to metabolize lactose, but people
who for thousands of years of culture are hunter/gatherers and
don't have domesticated sources of milk, they lose the ability
when they're infants. Now, in addition there seems to
be control areas, I won't call
control areas that switch off thesewhole sets of genes.to be
With a small change down here in
pairs or even a single deletion, the control, maybe a few base
downstream, all the base it sort of shifts all the ones
can have a significant impact. pairings downstream of it so it
trigger to activate or A single change down here might
genes. deactivate whole families of
of, if you remember the talk One of the things that came out
weeks ago by Andrea Gargas, was that was that her name?ouple of
Yeah, she had a slide that
between whales and hippos. showed a close connection
When they went into the whale genome and they deciphered the
whale genome, one of the things they found is that a whale has
all of the genes necessary to grow hind legs but they're
switched off. The control mechanism got
switched off. They don't grow hind legs but
they could. They even have the bone
structure to support it.
So how is it you can go from a But those genes got turned off.
genome, base pair or two here or small gradual change in the
So I'll end up by telling you tthe story of Willie the happy?
hippo.
it happened it happened 50 This is pure speculation but if
a group of hippos, a colony I mguess you'd call them or herd,
let's call them a herd of hippos.
Not exactly hippos like we have today but you'd recognize them
as hippos.
in the water but largely in the Live partly iwater.land, partly
And little Willie is born with a
hit by a cosmic ray and it defective, maybe his father got
mechanism for hind legs or turned off that control
But he's born as a little deformed hippo.
He doesn't have any hind legs.
duckling. HeThe other hippos kind ofly
ridicule him and he doesn't have
But he discovered that he doesn't really need hind legs
because he can swim pretty well.
technique of wiggling his body. He finds that the legs would
just drag through the water and slow him down.
He can actually swim faster without legs to slow him down.
So he can go out and eat lots of
fish and getting lots of food, maybe start catching more
He grows up to be a big, strong hippo even though he's deformed
with no hind legs.
athlete in the hippo society. AndHe'd be like we'd view ane an
athlete.
of hippos. Let's call him the Tiger Woods
going. And you can see where this is
impressed by his abilities. He's big and strong and he can
move around fast. So he fathers lots of children.
This is not a gene now but let's
is passed on to the offspring as say that the control mechanism
That all of his children are though it was a dominate gene.
that he had. born with the same deformity
around. AnAnd they grow up to big andve
strong. And they go back and to the
hippo colony and all the lady hippos are interested in all of
his sons, and his daughters are also big and strong and the male
hippos are attracted to them
So you have now within the hippo too.
legs and those with hind legs. community those without hind
don't have the hind legs and can But pretty soon the ones that
further and further into the swim better, they forage out
and pretty soon they don't ocean to get their food supply,
colony on land anymore. bAnd there's plenty of them nowo
and so they mate with each
And 50 million years later, make it 50,000,035 years later,
a paleontologist going through
fossilized remains of our the shalesWillie. across the
And he says, I've discovered a
It doesn't have hind legs. new species.
Going by what things look like, he thinks it's a new species.
And after that in time there's
Willie, all his descendants, but lots of fossils that look like
slow gradual changes to the quantum leap of a new species.
And of course other changes take
unable to interbreed anymore and places later that made them
there, at least that's my thspeculation as to how slowot
gradual changes can lead to quantum, catastrophic if you
want, cataclysmic leaps.
[APPLAUSE]