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Arthur Holmes and Continental Drift

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Henry Frankel
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Missouri-Kansas City, Kansas City, Missouri 64110, USA.

Extract

Although there are numerous and significant differences between the theories of scientific growth and change proposed by Kuhn, Lakatos, and Laudan, they all hold that specific scientific theories should be viewed as constitutive of more comprehensive theories. Kuhn calls those more general theories ‘paradigms’, Lakatos labels them ‘research programmes’ and Laudan refers to them as ‘research traditions’. They all argue that scientists are much more willing to give up the specific theory within a given research programme rather than the programme itself, and that individual theories should be viewed as attempts to increase the overall explanatory power of the more general theories, since the ultimate concern of the scientist is with the success of the general rather than the specific theory. When a basic theory or research programme is confronted with severe criticism, proponents attempt to protect the hard core or central elements of their programme through the invention of auxiliary hypotheses. Good auxiliary hypotheses adequately answer the objections for which they are designed, and suggest new avenues of research. In 1928, Arthur Holmes provided proponents of continental drift theory with an auxiliary hypothesis which afforded them a badly needed account of the forces responsible for continental drift. Although Holmes' proposal was not ultimately correct, it was the first plausible alternative offered by an exponent of the continental drift research programme.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1978

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References

NOTES

Research support for this paper has come from three sources, NEH, NSF and the University of Missouri at Kansas City. In addition, I should like to thank the editor of this journal for his helpful suggestions.

1 Thomas S. Kuhn's work, which is more familiar to historians of science than that of Lakatos or Laudan, is found in his The structure of scientific revolutions, 2nd edn., enlarged, Chicago, 1970.Google Scholar The most complete statement of Lakatos' position may be found in Lakatos, Imré and Musgrave, Alan (eds.) Criticism and the growth of knowledge, London, 1970.CrossRefGoogle ScholarLaudan, L.'s position is put forth in his Progress and its problems, Berkeley, 1977.Google Scholar Although their views differ in many significant respects, the question of which of the three best accounts for the case study developed in this paper is not considered. It neither follows that I think they each could equally account for this episode in the development of modern geological theory, or that they actually do equally account for it. To argue that one of them would provide a better account than the others, however, would require extensive treatment of the overall development of modern geological theory of which this case study is only a part.

2 For convenience I shall employ Lakatos' terminology rather than that of Kuhn or Laudan.

3 The first edition of Die Entstehmg der Kontinente und Ozeane appeared in 1915, and was followed by four more editions in 1920, 1922, (revised 4th edition of 1929), and 1936. All quotations from this work are from a 1966 English translation of the 1929 edition, Wegener, A., The origin of continents and oceans, New York, 1966.Google Scholar I am using the fourth edition because it is the most complete and it includes a number of comments by Wegener on the initial reception of his drift hypothesis.

4 Wegener, A., The origin of continents and oceans (tr. by Skerl, J.), London, 1924Google Scholar. This edition included a foreword by John Evans who was then die president of the Geological Society of London.

5 See, for example, either Hallam, A., A revolution in the earth Sciences, Oxford, 1973Google Scholar; or Marvin, U., Continental drift, the evolution of a concept, Washington, 1973.Google Scholar Both works contain excellent accounts of die development of drift theory and its eventual inclusion into plate tectonics.

6 van der Gracht, W. van Waterschoot (ed.), Theory of continental drift: a symposium on the origin and movement of land masses both inter-continental and intra-continental, as proposed by Alfred Wegener, Tulsa, 1928, pp. 104105.Google Scholar Besides editing the selections from this 1926 symposium for publication in 1928, van der Gracht included two papers of his own.

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34 Cf. Dunham, K. L., ‘Arthur Holmes’, in Biographical memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 1966, 12, 291310.Google Scholar

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37 Ibid. (Pt. IV), p. 504.

38 Ibid., p. 507.

39 Ibid., p. 515.

40 Ibid., p. 515.

41 Ibid. (Pt. V), p. 534.

42 Ibid., p. 534.

43 Ibid., p. 544.

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47 Ibid., p. 263.

48 Ibid., p. 276.

49 Ibid., p. 276.

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56 Ibid., p. 237.

57 Ibid., p. 237.

58 Holmes, , op. cit. (52), p. 432.Google Scholar

59 Holmes, , op. cit. (44), p. 574.Google Scholar

60 In modern parlance ‘substratum’ is ‘mantle’.

61 Ibid., p. 569.

62 Ibid., p. 574.

63 Ibid., p. 579. Figures reproduced by kind permission of the Geological Society of Glasgow.

64 Ibid., p. 580.

65 Ibid., p. 577.

66 Ibid., p. 577.

67 Ibid., p. 577.

68 Holmes, A., Principles of physical geology, New York, 1945, p. 508.Google Scholar

69 Holmes, , op. cit. (19), p. 347.Google Scholar

70 Holmes, , op. cit. (44), p. 585.Google Scholar

71 Ibid., pp. 580–1.

72 Ibid., pp. 580–1.

73 Ibid., p. 600.

74 Ibid., p. 600.

75 Cf. Marvin, , op. cit. (5), p. 105Google Scholar and Hallam, , op. cit (5), p. 36.Google Scholar

76 Jeffreys, H. in ‘Problems of the earth's crust: a discussion in Section E (Geography) of the British Association on 28 September 1931 in the Hall of the Society’, Geographical journal, 1931, 78, 433–55 (453).Google Scholar

77 Cf. Jeffreys' comments about Holmes in Jeffreys, ibid.

78 Ibid., p. 453.

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80 Holmes, , op. cit. (68), pp. 505–6.Google Scholar

81 Hallam cites as a possible reason for the neglect of Holmes' hypothesis the fact that his major paper (1931) appeared in such an obscure journal. However, I am sceptical about this because, as we have seen, Holmes stated his hypothesis in more popular journals, and included it in his widely circulated Principles of physical geology—the first edition of which was reprinted 18 times.

82 It is certainly true that there were geologists who did not belong to the contractionist programme, namely those who followed permanentism. The first real champion of permanentism was James Dana, who proposed it in 1846 in an article entitled ‘On volcanoes of the moon’. The work appeared in The American journal of science and arts. Bailey Willis resurrected Dana's permanentism in 1907 and 1910. Most permanentists, like Willis and Dana, lived in America.

83 Jeffreys, , op. cit. (76), p. 452.Google Scholar

84 Ibid., pp. 452–3.

85 Holmes, A. in ‘A continuation of problems of the earth's crust: a discussion in Section E (Geography) of the British Association on 28 September 1931 in the Hall of the Society’, Geographical journal, 1931, 78, 536–44 (542).Google Scholar

86 Cf. Marvin, , op. cit. (5)Google Scholar and Hallam, , op. cit. (5)Google Scholar. In addition, the changes in geology brought about by the development of techniques which could test hypotheses similar to Holmes' (e.g. Hess' hypothesis of seafloor spreading), through the advancement of oceanography, is dramatically illustrated by Menard. Menard traces the spectacular rise in the number of citations given to Hess' ‘History of ocean basins’ (the first published explication by Hess of his seafloor spreading hypothesis) after its corroboration by the confirmation of e.g., the Vine-Matthews hypothesis. Menard, H., Science: growth and change, Cambridge, Mass., 1971, pp. 119–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

87 Cited in Marvin, , op. cit. (5), p. 103.Google Scholar