A golden fossil turned to dross?
According to Natural Resources Canada:
To many mid-Victorian geologists and paleontologists these laminated green and grey rock specimens from altered limestones of the Canadian Shield of Ontario and Quebec were the most important fossils ever found because they constituted evidence of the existence of complex life forms deep in the Precambrian. J. William Dawson, the Principal of McGill University and one of the foremost geologists in Canada, named the fossil Eozoon canadense — the Canadian dawn animal. In his presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1864, Sir Charles Lyell singled out this fossil as “one of the greatest geological discoveries of his time”. Charles Darwin, in the fourth edition of Origin of Species in 1866, was relieved to be able to cite the first fossil evidence that the succession of life on earth proceeded from simple unicellular organisms to complex multicellular animals and plants.
But what happened thereafter is a cautionary tale.
British physicist David Tyler, whose work I have been profiling recently, tells the story here, of how the fossil was greeted with tidings of great joy.
Charles Darwin welcomed the find and brought it into the 4th edition of the Origin in 1866. He wrote: “After reading Dr Carpenter’s description of this remarkable fossil, it is impossible to feel any doubt regarding its organic nature”. The problem for Darwin was that the earliest known fossils were complex, and his theory required something much simpler to precede the forms of the Cambrian Explosion. It was a relief when Eozoon appeared to provide evidence supporting gradualism.
In the 6th edition, Darwin modified the text to read: “The existence of the Eozoon in the Laurentian formation of Canada is generally admitted”.
But there was dissent. In this case, from geologist Professor William King and chemist Thomas Rowney at Queen’s College, Galway.
They did not think that Eozoon was in fact a fossil. And they had good reasons for thinking it wasn’t. They knew how it could have been formed without any input from a life form at all.
So what happened between 1866, when those Galway men were basically a problem to be seen off, and 1879 when the truth was eventually revealed?
As Tyler explains,
The characteristics of the ensuing controversy are the subject of an interesting paper by Adelman.* She points out that the Canadian geologists adopted a “diffusion” model of communication: “scientific facts were confirmed within the scientific community and then presented to the public.” London was the focus of their attention, because the opinion-formers were located there. “The ‘Eozoonists’ felt that the fossil’s credibility was established once the leaders of the scientific community in London had accepted it.” The dissenters, however, chose not to play this game.
And the Galway dissenters were treated with contempt, their credibility under severe question, for years. Their crime? Raising entirely reasonable objections against Darwinism. Read More ›