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The Earth's Shifting Crust by Charles Hapgood - wire of information

The Earth's Shifting Crust by Charles Hapgood - wire of information

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320<br />

EARTH'S SHIFTING CRUST<br />

cant thing about the Goldschmidt theory is that he produced<br />

it in an effort to gain time for the process <strong>of</strong> evolution, to<br />

accelerate it, so that the amount <strong>of</strong> evolutionary change in<br />

life forms could be brought into rough agreement with the<br />

available amount <strong>of</strong> geological time. <strong>The</strong> rejection <strong>of</strong> his<br />

sound considera-<br />

theory, if the rejection is indeed based upon<br />

tions, means that another factor must be found to account<br />

for the tempo <strong>of</strong> evolution.<br />

3.<br />

Climate and Evolution<br />

Evolutionists, in general, agree that climatic change must<br />

have had a powerful influence on evolution. Geologists have,<br />

as I have pointed out, found a correspondence between<br />

periods <strong>of</strong> climatic change and changes<br />

in the forms <strong>of</strong> life.<br />

It is evident that as long as the general environment remains<br />

roughly the same, there can be only gentle selection pressures<br />

such as, apparently, are inadequate to account for evolution.<br />

With static environmental conditions, forms <strong>of</strong> life may con-<br />

tinue virtually unchanged for tens or hundreds <strong>of</strong> millions<br />

<strong>of</strong> years. <strong>The</strong>re are any number <strong>of</strong> organisms living today<br />

whose very similar ancestors lived in remote geological<br />

periods. To name merely a few, there is the newly discovered<br />

coelacanth, a fish whose ancestors, one hundred or more<br />

million years ago, looked as he does today; the recently dis-<br />

covered Dawn Redwood, found growing in China, after hav-<br />

ing been regarded as extinct since its close relatives disap-<br />

peared in Alaska about 20,000,000 years ago; the sphenodon,<br />

a reptile <strong>of</strong> New Zealand, whose ancestors, very closely re-<br />

sembling himself, were contemporaries <strong>of</strong> Tyrannosaurus<br />

rex; horseshoe crabs, whose time span may amount to half a<br />

billion years; palm trees, whose age has just been "jumped"<br />

another 10,000,000 years (261); sharks; scorpions, and so on.<br />

Sanderson has pointed out that "living fossils" are simply too<br />

numerous to list (365). We can take it that, if external conditions<br />

are stable, or if animals and plants can migrate around

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