For more than a century, the religious Theory of Uniformity, developed in Britain, has prevailed in scientific circles as the ideological basis of the universe. One of its most famous proponents was the
parishioner at
St Mary's Anglican Church,
the Bachelor of Arts and Doctor of Laws Charles Darwin. A century and a half ago, the Theory of Uniformity was only one of the theories, and academic circles were debating its validity and considering alternative theories. This was particularly true in the fields of geology and palaeontology, since fresh, well-preserved remains of large extinct mammal species were still being discovered in many parts of the world, such as the South American pampas. Today, a couple of centuries later, the undecomposed carcasses of large extinct mammals are found only in the thawing glaciers of
Siberia and
North America. For example, many such cases are described by
Henry H. Howorth, M.P., F.S.A., M.R.A.S., in "
The Mammoth and the Flood. An Attempt to Confront the Theory of Uniformity with the Facts of Recent Geology", in which
Howorth argues against Darwin and other proponents of uniformity.
By today, the notion of 'Theory of Uniformity' has fallen out of the scientific mainstream, with the ideas of uniformity and immutability themselves having extended well beyond geology and palaeontology (becoming a
uniformitarianism methodology in these disciplines), permeating many academic disciplines and defining general ideas about time and space in the historical and prehistoric periods. The modern maps of history textbooks can be cited as an example, defining a figurative perception of the past even from the schoolbench. They show absolutely identical to modern coastal borders of land and river channels, implying their invariability at least for the last several millennia. Well, all objectively observable evidence of major changes, according to the religious Theory of Uniformity, is automatically thrown into the distant past, hundreds of thousands and millions of years ago. Perhaps, as some supporters of
catastrophism remark, the Theory of Uniformity is a
defensive reaction of mankind's psyche to the relatively recent global cataclysms, an attempt to push them out of the collective memory, to eliminate the feeling of anxiety about their possible sudden repetition in the nearest future.
Building on the foundation of Theory of Uniformity instilled by a
Prussian-style national compulsory education system, Canadian oil magnate
Maurice Strong has
developed the now globally promoted "climate change" ideology, which aims to stop climate change despite the fact that variability is the original defining parameter of the concept "climate" itself. However, there is a wealth of past cartographic material depicting different coastlines and river beds than there is today. For example,
many maps of the past show that only a few centuries ago, in historical times, the space between the Caspian Sea and the Aral Sea, which is now land, was a single body of water. As a rule, supporters of the religious Theory of Uniformity explain this by the mistakes and imperfect knowledge of ancient cartographers, excluding the possibility of significant variability of landscapes in the historical period.
However, despite the total dominance of religious ideas of uniformity in academia, modern technology allows independent researchers to re-examine established postulates and visually demonstrate their invalidity. Thanks to the Landsat and Google Earth Engine programmes, anyone can now study how the surface of the Earth has changed over the past forty years. Some rivers have changed constantly and actively over time in ways that would be almost impossible to see by direct observation but are clearly visible in animations made up of aerial photographs. The
Ucayali River for example, a navigable tributary of the Amazon, changes its course at an impressive rate:
Source of animation
Source of animation (
via chispa1707@lj)
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