Time grinds on

It's odd to think how many iterations of life there have been on the earth. From the Cambian Explosion to today, which I'll call the Age of the Primate, life has ebbed and flowed as it morphed from one form to another. I have a fossil of a trilobite on my desk to remind me, when I get a bit down, that this little fellow too had his trials and tribulations. A life is just a speck of time, so enjoy it while you can.

A long time ago I read Rachael Carson's The Sea Around Us. It is a wonderful book in that it gives the oceans their own geography. From experience, the Gulf of Mexico is different than the Pacific, which is different from the Indian Ocean. Carson does a good job getting that across, dispelling the land-dwellers' notion that water is just water.

However, there is a weakness in the book which has to do with my trilobites and monkeys. Throughout the entire book she treated the oceans and continents as something eternal. There was land-building and erosion that took place around the margins, but the continents themselves were unchanging. As I read it I wondered, what about plate tectonics? Did she not know about the Theory of Continental Drift? 

This was before the Internet, so I didn't know the answer to that question until about half-way through the book when she finally mentioned Continental Drift. She covered it in a couple of sentences, dismissing it as an obviously ridiculous theory from cuckoo-land that was best ignored. In juxtaposition to Galileo's 'and yet it moves' she offered, 'but not the continents'.

This prejudice, that places and times are something that are, or at least should be, frozen in amber is surprisingly widespread. It is obvious in modern Environmentalists, from the snail darter to ignoring the Sun and the receding Ice Age as they peer at their brief historical thermometer, but it is common elsewhere as well: canceling historical figures for living in their time, turning from cultural diffusion to cultural appropriation, and the myth of the 'good ol' days' as an aspiration. 

On this blog I frequently poke fun of old-timey things. I suspect that 100 years from now there will be some future Flares poking fun of our foibles.