Synopsis
Explains how the cataclysmic-collision theory of dinosaur extinction came about and the scientific melee that ensued
Reviews
Powell has an unfortunate tendency to fall back on cliche when better choices abound.... But he writes about science with elegance, and the result is a beguiling book.
Powell lays out persuasively the evidence that has accumulated to give force to the Alvarez theory. He also maintains that the impact theory has transformed geology.
``What killed the dinosaurs? At last the great mystery has been solved.'' Coming from an esteemed geologist, a former college president, and currently the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, Powell's claim cannot be dismissed as the ravings of a crank, but its certitude is, to say the least, unusual. Then the qualifier: ``A theory is never proven,'' which settles Powell square in the Popper/Kuhn nexus and gives him room to move. The answer to what killed the dinosaurs, Powell believes, has been found in the Alvarez Theory, elucidated by a Nobel Prizewinning physicist and his geologist son, which suggests a random catastrophe--a large meteorite striking the earth--raised clouds of dust, lowered temperatures and halted photosynthesis and devastated the food chain, thus spelling the great lizards' doom. This is long at odds with the gradualist, deep-time approach governing much geologic thought, and provoked much scorn. Powell endeavors to make the Alvarez idea accessible, but he can't help but wade through thickets of vertebrate paleontology and rare-metal chemistry, pick his way among impact markers like shatter cones and shocked quartz grains, painstakingly dissect the iridium anomaly found in Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary clays. Even so, Powell rarely loses his readers, and all but the most geochronologically, microisotopically, paleobotanically challenged will be able to follow his drift (and appreciate the fact that he gives rival theories their day in his people's court, as well as admitting to the more outlandish conjectures of the pro-impact theorists). Although the evidence Powell submits on behalf of the impact theory is compelling, perhaps more so are his comments on the politics of scientific enquiry: the power plays and back stabbings, the ugly career-ending insults, the absurd effort involved in querying entrenched, if suspect, theories. Powell's overriding notion is undebatable: Chance happenings surely help shape our world, and serendipity--in available tools, say, or disciplinary cross-fertilization--fuels scientific advancement. (photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Powell is the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, and taught geology at Oberlin College for 20 years. In 1980, a physicist father and his geologist son rocked the scientific world by their proposed theory that dinosaurs became extinct because of an impact by an asteroid or comet. Powell recounts the bitter debates over Luis and Walter Alvarez's idea and years of intense research that followed, culminating in the discovery of a gigantic crater deeply buried in the Yucatan Peninsula, which seemed to prove the probability that science and evolution are punctuated by random events. The author's presentation of the dramatic events surrounding the controversy, the bitter refutations, and, finally, acceptance of the Alvarez theory is fascinating by itself. But Powell also examines the equally interesting factors that inhibit science from making paradigm shifts. Some formulas and terminology are designed for specialists in the field, but the overall content here is geared to general readers and is utterly engrossing. [Interested readers may also want Walter Alvarez's own account, T. Rex and the Crater of Doom, LJ 6/15/97.?Ed.]?Gloria Maxwell, Kansas City P.L., M.
-?Gloria Maxwell, Kansas City P.L., MO
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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