"The International Herald Tribune" August 23, 2001 Thursday, Pg. 8
LENGTH: 936 words

It Came From Outer Space; Catastrophist Theories of Life Gaining Ground
Barry James
 

   They're called catastrophists, a group of British scientists who question
many of the aspects of Darwinian evolution and argue that life on Earth and the
geology of the planet have been constantly reshaped by asteroid strikes and
other external shocks.

   The latest sally from the catastrophist camp comes from the astronomer and
mathematician Chandra Wickramasinghe, who told a scientific congress in
California in July that he had found microbes in air samples scooped up by a
balloon flying 25 miles (about 40 kilometers) above the Earth's surface.

   Mr. Wickramasinghe, director of the department of Astrobiology at Cardiff
University in Wales, said it was the first positive identification of
extraterrestrial microbial life outside the atmosphere. The fact that a major
British university has set up a department dedicated to a theory still regarded
with much skepticism and hostility in the academic community is one indication
of how accepted catastrophist ideas have become in British science.

   There is no school of catastrophists as such in Britain. They are a loosely
linked community of scientists drawn together by the gravitational pull of
common interests, and who occasionally work together on joint projects or books.
"There is no sense in which we come together to push a common view," said Mark
Bailey, an astronomer who is director of the Observatory at Armagh in Northern
Ireland, now a center for catastrophist thinking. "We are really individuals,"
he continued, "although most of us have worked together in different
combinations, so in that sense we get on well with one another." Catastrophism
has never had much of a following in the United States, partly because of the
debate between creationists and evolutionists, and partly because of the cultish
influence of Immanuel Velikovsky, a pseudo-scientist who believed ancient myths
could be explained by a near collision between Venus and Earth.

   Because of the impact of the Velikovsky affair in America, "it is very hard
for practicing scientists there to embrace the concept that catastrophism is
really an ongoing process," Mr. Bailey said. On the other hand, the Society for
Interdisciplinary Studies in Britain, which Mr. Bailey described as "a broad
church," includes some Velikovskians.

   Mr. Wickramasinghe and his mentor, the astronomer Fred Hoyle, have long
argued that diseases like influenza that strike suddenly and simultaneously at
many places around the Earth arrive here from space. They say that bombardment
by external viruses or bacteria is a more logical explanation of life on Earth
than the Darwinian view that micro-organisms evolved into higher life forms by
constant replication and evolution. While the Venus theory has been dismissed,
two other British astronomers, Victor Clube and Bill Napier, developed the
theory that the Earth is orbiting in the tail of a giant destroyed comet, and is
under constant bombardment by bits of cometary debris, ranging from dust to
sizable rocks. Occasionally, they say, it is hit by a particularly large chunk
of rock, like the asteroid that fell in Siberia in 1908, or possibly a huge body
that resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs. A leading astronomer of the
last century, Ernst Opik of Estonia, who was the first scientist to compute the
collision probabilities of comets and asteroids against planets, worked at
Armagh from the 1940s to the 1980s. His grandson, Lembit Opik, a member of
Parliament, successfully helped lead the scientific campaign that led the
British government to set up the official Task Force on Potentially Hazardous
Near Earth Objects.

   Another leading catastrophist is Mike Baillie, an expert in early climate
change, at Queen's University in Belfast. Mr. Baillie starts from scientific
grounds, such as the measurement of tree rings and the examination of ice core
samples, and then delves into mythology to find out if legends can throw light
on the extraordinary, perhaps catastrophic climatic events revealed by the
records. In a book, "Exodus to Arthur," Mr. Baillie asks whether the
simultaneous emergence of legends about dragons in China and angels in Western
mythology were common reactions to the appearance of a comet.

   Mr. Baillie points out that contemporary accounts at the time of the Black
Death, which killed one third of Europe's population in the 14th century,
mentioned droughts, floods, masses of dead fish, earthquakes, sheets of fire,
stinking smoke, huge hailstones and blasts of hot wind -- all possible
descriptions, he said, of a close encounter with an asteroid or comet.

   One record spoke of a large bright star over Paris, and another said that the
sky looked yellow and the air red because of burning vapors. Tree ring studies
reveal evidence of massive climate disturbance at the same time, Mr. Baillie
added.

   Catastrophism began receiving a fairer hearing in the 1980s after Walter and
Luis Alvarez published an article in Science proposing that the extinction of
the dinosaurs had been caused by the impact of an asteroid about six miles in
diameter.

   This was later linked to the crater, about 110 miles in diameter, identified
in 1990 at Chicxulub in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. About 130 such craters
have now been identified on Earth. In 1994, scientists watched at least 21 large
fragments from the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet plunge into the surface of Jupiter,
throwing up fireballs as big as the Earth. That, and a mass of research culled
from space observation, lends some credence to the catastrophist view that a
future disastrous impact on Earth is not a question of if, but when.

POWRÓT