.
Dewey McLean is a geologist who crusaded on behalf of volcanoes and lost the Great
Dinosaur Extinction Debate against Luis Alvarez.
Dewey proposes that
the Deccan Traps in India spewed lava for hundreds of thousands of years until they finally
managed to kill off the dinosaurs. In a nutshell, Mountain Dewey proposes for the Cretaceous
what his British counterpart Paul Wignall proposes for the Permian: that volcanoes are the
agents that Mother Nature uses to produce mass extinctions. This nonsense is easily
debunked here.
It is this dangerous position of his is what brought him head to head with Luis Alvarez who
was enthusiastically peddling his amusing asteroid theory at the time. This is a fight for which
both of them will be remembered more than for the nonsense of volcanism or asteroids as
agents of extinction.
A
Volcanists also fail to explain the physical mechanism of how gases and a rarified or toxic
atmosphere leave
certain animals alive. Dewey does it in reverse. He assumes that the defunct species could not
tolerate the
sudden change and that those that survived apparently could. This is merely a DESCRIPTION.
He doesn't EXPLAIN by what physical mechanism it happened.
, of course, becomes the Achilles Heel
of his theory. Without an explanation, without a mechanism that can explain step by step the
physical cause,
he is left with magic.
| Dewey McLean |
| According to |
.
| To comment on any of the pages in this website go to: Rational Scientific Method |
| The History of Life on Earth |
