It is this dangerous position of his what brought him head to head with a deluded Luis Alvarez who was at
the time enthusiastically peddling his amusing asteroid theory. 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.
Dewey McLean is a geologist who crusaded on behalf of volcanoes against Luis Alvarez
and his asteroidists and lost the Great Dinosaur Extinction Debate. That's his only claim
to fame.
Dewey proposes that the Deccan Traps in India spewed lava for hundreds of thousands
of years until the lava and gases and chemical reactions finally made life unbearable for
those plants and animals unfit to compete. It is this 'unfitness' nonsense that all these
geologists and paleontologists are brainwashed in college with and repeat like parrots.
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.
| Dewey McLean |
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| The History of Life on Earth |
- What is the problem with volcanism?
The problem is that it cannot explain selectivity, the only thing an extinction theory has to explain. You would
think that volcanists would explain how the toxic chemical reactions kill some animals and leave others alive.
Mountain Dewey does something different. Whereas his coreligionist Wignall proposes that chemicals
intoxicated or chemically burned the Permian terrestrial and aquatic floras and faunas and killed them ALL,
Dewey claims that it was heat that did away with SOME of the living creatures of the Cretaceous life. To
accomplish this, he raises global temperatures just enough to kill off the floras and faunas that he wants
eliminated and then attempts to justify how 'better adapted' life-forms survived. It's the same old, same old
Charley Darwin 'survival of the fittest' nonsense that geologists and paleontologists are taught to memorize
by rote in college. Since Dewey is well aware that they are all conditioned to accept this at face value and
will never question it, he is quite safe with his proposal. The global temperatures rise a few degrees,
enough to kill off the dinosaurs, the mosasaurs, the ammonites, the flying reptiles, and the algae, but spare
the mammals, the crocs, the turtles, the snakes, the birds and the magnolias. It never occurred to him that
the long-necked dinos and the cycads, cycadeoids and ginkgos of Jurassic fame lived in warmer climates
than either the mammals or the angiosperms that eventually dislodged their descendants at the close of the
Cretaceous.
But the funny part of his exposition is that Dewey concluded that a rise in temperature rendered the poor
dinos sterile. It affected their sperm and they couldn't reproduce any more.
My God! How is it possible that people who warmed a seat for 10 years at a university come up with such
jaw-dropping theories? He should really have let some peer-reviewers take a look at it before publishing.
Then again, perhaps Mountain Dewey was just talking about his personal life...
Dewey McLean and Luis Alvarez, two intellectual mice fighting the fight of the century in Paleo-Mathemagix. Meteor Alvarez slaughtered Mountain Dewey and took the Cretaceous. No contest! However, the vindictive volcanists were able to prevent the takeover of the Permian so far. |
Mountain Dewey's No-Cone Theory |