Media Criticism, Science And Society

The Science Is Settled

24 Comments

A giant asteroid hit really did kill the dinosaurs.

OK, the title is a joke (on the warm mongers) — the phrase “the science is settled” is an oxymoron, and goes against the very nature of science. But there does seem to be a growing “consensus” (another scientific oxymoron) that Louis Alverez got it right three decades ago. The initial resistance, it always seemed to me, to be resistance to the notion by paleontologists, who were extremely terracentric, that something extraterrestrial could have such a sudden and catastrophic effect on the planet and its most dominant order. It didn’t help that it was in a field far outside their domain.

24 thoughts on “The Science Is Settled”

  1. So obviously in the future, science will be voted on as to what’s true and what isn’t. I don’t remember this scenario ever being put into a mainstream SF story.

    I guess you can predict technological trends, but social ones? Not so much.

  2. I wonder how many more decades before the general public stops repeating the mantra of “even if we knew there was another one coming, there’s nothing we could do about it.” Almost as absurd as the mantra of “we’ve all gotta die sometime.”

  3. One regret I have in life is not answering when a blogger (the guy who used to play that kid genius on that sci fi TV show) declared in nice big friendly letters “THERE IS NO DEBATE” on global warming. Of course if there is no debate, there is no science. I let that silliness stand unanswered because I didnt think it was worth the effort to correct mister “I’m not really a genius I just played one on TV”. My mistake.

  5. Rand,

    Actually there is an interesting back story to this based on a debate of the dating of both the Chicxulub crater and the KT boundary. There was speculation that a second impact was involved. And there has also been an on going debate on the extinction process and why selected groups survived while others didn’t.

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3520837.stm
    Dinosaur impact theory challenged
    By Paul Rincon
    BBC News Online science staff

    [[[The Chicxulub impact occurred during this warming period and, although the environmental effects were severe, it did not cause the extinction of the dinosaurs.

    The team believes a second impact, 300,000 years after the Chicxulub collision, finished off the creatures.]]]

    I suspect this latest consensus was in response to this.

    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090427010803.htm

    New Blow Against Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Theory, Geologists Find

    [[[The newest research, led by Gerta Keller of Princeton University in New Jersey, and Thierry Adatte of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, uses evidence from Mexico to suggest that the Chicxulub impact predates the K-T boundary by as much as 300,000 years.

    “Keller and colleagues continue to amass detailed stratigraphic information supporting new thinking about the Chicxulub impact, and the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous,” says H. Richard Lane, program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research. “The two may not be linked after all.”]]]

    I have been following this since the early 1980’s (a friend of mine at NM Tech was doing a dissertation at that time on the extinction in New Mexico and I used to go out in the field with them…) and it will be interesting watching the next round 🙂

  7. Ha! I took the same tack in my own blog post a couple hours later.

    The point I found interesting was that the authors of the ‘big study’ didn’t go out of their way to call people who still disagree “deniers.”

  8. Trent,
    That is exactly what one of them did say. The post was a couple of years back and went on to say the only thing you needed to know about the whole thing was in the 2 links he provided. One link led to the infamous IPCC summary. The other went to a story linking some skeptical scientists to oil company money (a thinly veiled personal attack).

    I don’t want to make too much of all this. The blogger in question seems to be a pretty nice guy normally, and is certainly a very good writer. In this situation though, I think he surrendered to the common human vice of intellectual vanity.

  9. I have been following this since the early 1980’s (a friend of mine at NM Tech was doing a dissertation at that time on the extinction in New Mexico and I used to go out in the field with them…) and it will be interesting watching the next round 🙂

    Huh, when were you out at NMT? I attended from 1987-1991.

  10. I have always suspected it was something that occluded the atmosphere with particulates (asteroid collisions, volcano explosions, or something like that). I remember there also used to be a theory that it was a nearby supernova burst followed by a gamma ray storm.

  11. What really killed the dinosaurs is that one species developed enough intelligence to hunt the the other big ones to extinction, then killed themselves off in a nuclear war that just looks like an asteroid impact.

  12. Since impacts of the size of the one at the KT boundary occur only once every 100 million years, and since it occurred very very close to the boundary, the notion that there was no causal link requires one to accept that a very unlikely coincidence occurred. This is a strong reason to be skeptical of competing theories.

  13. Hi Karl,

    I was before you. 1977-1979 and then 1981-1983. In between I went to the University of Hawaii at Hilo.

  14. Paul,

    True, but we also know that close encounters with planets may split a NEO which may then orbit in a period that keeps bringing it close at regular intervals. It is possible that this occurred with the dinosaur killer, with one major piece impacting, then a second part hitting 300,000 years later. But again, it will be interesting to watch this story develop.

    Hopefully their idea of a second impact in the Indian Ocean is followed up on. Perhaps the two impacters, if there are two, could be linked chemically if they split up after an earlier close encounter with Earth. It would also be interesting to see if any lunar craters date to this time frame, although it is a much smaller target.

  15. After ignoring Keller and other skeptics for many years, the pro-crater forces got so frustrated that they decided to put all the evidence together.

    Frustrated by someone they ignored… sounds like the very definition of denial.

  17. I’m not a scientist, but I’ve always had a layman’s interest in astronomy. When I was in college I also took an introductory course in geology and learned a little about the origins of that science. When geology was just beginning as a science in the 17th and 18th centuries there was a debate between “catastrophism” vs. “gradualism”. The catastrophists believed that events like the Biblical Flood accounted for rock formations and fossil deposits. The gradualists said that slow, natural processes such as weathering, volcanism, and sedimentation could explain their observations. Of course, the gradualists eventually won out. This controversy was roughly analogous to the debate between the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems among 16th century astronomers.

    So it came as no surprise to me that geologists, paleontologists, and other Earth-centric scientists had an almost visceral dislike for the asteroid theory. A massive asteroid hitting the Earth is pretty much indistinguishable from a smiting by the hand of an angry God. It positively reeked of catastrophism, which they thought had been relegated to the dustbin of history.

    Of course, to an astronomer, looking at the solar system as a whole, it is gradualism.

    Note: I don’t intend any disrespect to geologists, paleontologists, or religious believers in my above comment.

  19. Rand,

    It wasn’t Luis Alvarez, it was his geologist son, Walter, with aid from his father in the identification of the iridium layer.

    As detailed in Walter’s book, “T. Rex and the Crater of Doom”, the initial resistance was from other geologists, who had spent many decades coming around to the “gradualist” belief that the geological time scale was a very long one, only to be told to believe in the “catastrophist” theory that the dinosaurs had died all at once.

  20. MfK:

    An interesting hypothesis. Now support it with concrete evidence, please. (A passage in a book of Bronze Age myth badly translated several times in succession is not evidence – sorry but it isn’t.)

    It would be simple, actually. Dinosaur and human bones in the same sedimentary rock layer would do.

    Evolution is a scientific theory, largely because it could be refuted very simply – as has been said, rabbit bones in Precambrian rock would do that job just fine. “God did it” is not, largely because it is impossible to test it.

  23. You might be right, Tom, but the trouble is that a fairly large number of people take young-Earth creationism and/or Bible literalism seriously.

    Actually, I have read a number of tracts from various rather extremist religious groups (Jehovah’s Witnesses are quite active in my town, for example) and they all make the same mistake. They seem to think that because they believe every last word in (the edition in their language of) a particular book, that others who read those words will be persuaded.

    Take the Flood myth, for example. A few minutes’ thought will suffice to tell you that it is complete and utter nonsense. But some people can’t and/or won’t take those few minutes.

    The Genesis creation myth was suitable for those who dreamt it up. It isn’t suitable now.

  24. Dale, I know of the theory that birds are descended from dinosaurs. But I doubt if any of the ones chirping outside your window are three stories tall.

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