Darwin Got it Wrong and It’s Not What You’re Thinking
by Alan Caruba (11/24/08)
Charles Darwin got it wrong. This is not to disparage the man. Science is an ever evolving process and scientific theories are subject to being replaced by newer knowledge. Most certainly, Darwin (1809-1882) got everyone thinking about evolution, but the problem is that evolution is not a slow process. It happens very fast.
Indeed, Darwin’s friend, the famed biologist, Thomas Huxley, supported aspects of Darwin’s theory, but didn’t believe that evolution was gradual. Then, too, Darwin had to contend with those who believe that Noah built an ark and put two of all the creatures of the Earth on it. Religion is a great comfort, but it is no substitute for science.
I first became acquainted with Robert W. Felix through his book, Not by Fire, but by Ice, that pointed out that the Earth is on the cusp of a new ice age. Insofar as the Earth is now fully a decade into a new cycle of cooling, one that could last several decades or evolve into a new, full blown ice age, Felix not only got it right, but, in the course of writing his book, discovered an even more frightening scenario.
Magnetic Reversals and Evolutionary Leaps: The True Origin of the Species is Felix’s new book (available from http://www.iceagenow.com) and, were it not for fans like myself and others, it is not likely to make it to the cover of leading news magazines or become a segment on “Sixty Minutes.” It will be largely ignored by the mainstream news media for the same reason they ignored his first book. Enthralled by the bogus “global warming” hoax, the mainstream media will find his new book equally appalling for its presentation of facts that run contrary to their ignorance.
Felix is far from alone in this view that new species are not the result of a long accretion of changes. The late paleontologist, Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) popularized that field of science with articles and books. Gould noted, “Gradualism is not a fact of nature. Most new species appear with a bang, not a protracted crescendo.” Fossil records demonstrate that a species remains unchanged for millions of years before abruptly disappearing, “only to be replaced just as rapidly with a species that is, though clearly related, substantially different. Nature does take leaps.”
Felix’s great talent comes both in his ability to read and absorb the writings of scientists from different fields of study, and in his ability to explain complex issues to people like myself. I always remind readers that, while I am a science writer, I am not a scientist. Felix is a science writer and one who brings a great deal of passion to his quest to understand the history of the Earth and the life that appears to distinguish it from others in our galaxy.
While researching ice ages for his previous book, he became intrigued by a phenomenon that always coincides with them, magnetic reversals. In addition to mass extinctions of species that always accompanied magnetic reversals, Felix and others noticed that new species replaced them. For example, human beings are, in the long history of the Earth, 4.5 billion years, are “blindingly new”, having existed a mere 200,000 years.
“Mass extinctions,” writes Felix, “have been the rule, rather than the exception, for the 3.5 billion years that life has existed on this planet. Almost identical, each extinction was abrupt, each was extensive, and each was caused by some temporary, unexplainable event.”
Permit me to pause at this point and note the vanity and idiocy of those who demand that humans must conserve every species on Earth, no matter the cost involved. This nation has spent billions via the Endangered Species Act. In a similar fashion, the notion that humans are responsible for a non-existent “global warming” is the justification for measures that will wreck the economies of nations and cause untold losses of human life thanks to famines that should be avoided.
The next time you hear or read the word “environmentalist”, you should also hear and read “fascist” for the core of the environmental movement is the belief that human beings are “a cancer” on the Earth and should be reduced to a minimum.
The real threat to life on Earth are magnetic reversals, as revealed by magnetostratigraphy, the study of the magnetic properties of ancient layers of sediment (strata) now hardened into rock. Major reversals “appear to occur in sync with ice ages” and other measurements of time. “And it happens fast!” says Felix.
The Earth is at the end of a cyclical interglacial period. Such periods are about 11,500 years in length and it has been 11,500 years since the last ice age. That portends that another magnetic reversal is due as well.
Though decried as “deniers”, those of us who have been skeptical of the claims of Al Gore and the legion of global warming charlatans, the real deniers are those refuse to acknowledge the facts put forth and explained in Felix’s new book.
Those who would have you dramatically alter your lifestyle, by ending the use of oil, natural gas, and coal for energy, by installing thousands of wind turbines and miles of solar panels, are willfully ignoring the signs that the Earth is poised to enter a new age in which life as we know it—including our own—will be dramatically changed and to a large extent even exterminated.
There is nothing humans can do about this.
© Alan Caruba, November 2008
http://alancaruba.com/
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