ancient history: Catastrophism
Catastrophism is defined as the doctrine that certain vast geological changes in the earth's history were caused by catastrophes rather than gradual evolutionary processes.
Georges Cuvier was a French naturalist and zoologist who was the first scientist to point to catastrophic events in the past. Through his work, he concluded that evidence points to cyclical creations and destructions of life forms by global extinction events such as deluges.
According to Cuvier, it is clear from the fossil record he studied that change in species is not accomplished through a gradual change. He proposed rather catastrophes which caused extinction and that new life forms had moved in from other areas. In his 1796 paper on living and fossil elephants, he said:
“All of these facts, consistent among themselves, and not opposed by any report, seem to me to prove the existence of a world previous to ours, destroyed by some kind of catastrophe.”
Cuvier also believed that the stratigraphic record indicated that there had been several catastrophes which he viewed as recurring natural events, amid long intervals of stability during the history of life on earth.
Cuvier never tried to link his work to any religious or popular narrative of the time. He viewed it as pure scientific of which the facts need to tell him the story. He, therefore, never refer to the Deluge in the Bible. According to him, therefore, were many deluges which drove change. This led Cuvier to become an active proponent of the geological school of thought called catastrophism that maintained that many of the geological features of the earth and the history of life could be explained by catastrophic events rather than gradual change.
In the 1950s, Immanuel Velikovsky postulated catastrophic events based on the movement of planets in the recorded history of mankind. Based on his hypothesis he made variance predictions which were later proved to be correct. Scientists vigorously rejected Velikovsky's conjectures.
In the 1980s Walter and Luis Alvarez published a well-received scientific paper suggesting that a 10 kilometres asteroid struck the Earth about 66 million years ago. The impact wiped out 70% of all species including the dinosaurs. In support of this hypothesis, the impact crater was identified in 1990 at Chicxulub in the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. The observation of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 cometary collision with Jupiter gave further credibility that catastrophic events as postulated is possible.
In 1999 David Keys published his book “Catastrophe” where speculate about a more recent catastrophe. According to him, it was a catastrophe without precedent in recorded history. It started in 535 A.D. and caused a dusky haze preventing normal sunlight. Without stating what the event was, he based occurrence of it on the crisis happened in the after the match. The event leads to crops failed in Asia and the Middle East as global weather patterns radically altered. Bubonic plague, exploding out of Africa, wiped out entire populations in Europe.
According to Keys the catastrophic event end to the old world by bringing ancient cultures to collapse and provide the space for the emergence of a new culture which developed into the modern world known today.
In 2007 Nissam Taleb published his book "Black Swan" where is argue the existence of unpredictable events or Black Swans as he called it.
Georges Cuvier was the first scientist concluded from his study of fossil records that change happened through catastrophic events rather than gradual change (1796). Catastrophes caused extinction and the formation of new life to fill the gap. The idea of catastrophe was taken further by Immanuel Velikovsky in 1950 by providing an explanation of what might have caused these catastrophes. Walter and Luis Alvarez paper in 1980 about an asteroid which struck Earth 66 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs was well received by the scientific world. As Cuvier studied fossil records to came to the conclusion of catastrophic events, David Keys in 1999 published his book where he studied the crisis in civilisations from 353 A.D. and concluded that it was caused by a catastrophic event which blocked most of the sunlight out.
The following article will explore the concept of Taleb's Black Swan in more detail.
Sources:
Keys, David. 1999, "Catastrophe", Ballantine Publishing
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Cuvier
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/catastrophism