Revisiting Clarence King’s "Catastrophism and Evolution" (1877)

Abstract

Published comments by American scientists on Darwin’s evolutionary theory are rather rare in the latter half of the 19th century. Clarence King, the founding director of the U.S. Geological Survey in 1879, and an experienced field geologist, focused on the relation between Darwin’s evolutionary concepts and the larger context of Hutton/Lyell’s uniformitarianism versus Cuvier’s catastrophism in his 1877 paper, “Catastrophism and Evolution.” King knew that the fossil record contains little or no data supporting Darwin’s vision of gradual evolutionary change (indeed, Darwin himself was also painfully aware of that fact). Instead, using horse evolution seen in the rocks of the American West, the very example that by the 1920s had become the shining exemplar of gradual evolutionary change, King argued for catastrophic extinction and evolutionary replacement by “plastic” species that were able to survive in modified form as components of the succeeding biota. Though he could not see such change as involving natural selection, in this novel (for the times, whether in Europe or elsewhere, insofar as I am aware) use of the term “plasticity,” there may well be adumbrations of modern evolutionary biology. King’s themes became muted as Americans began to embrace more fully Darwin’s work. But his version of catastrophism never entirely disappeared, especially in paleobiological circles. And it came back in more fully modern form with force beginning with the work of Norman D. Newell on mass extinctions in the mid-20th century—and with that of two of his students: Eldredge and Gould’s (1972) “Punctuated Equilibria.” This essay introduces King’s “Catastrophism and Evolution” (published in The American Naturalist, vol. 11, no. 8, August 1877, pp. 449–470) for the journal’s “Classics in Biological Theory” collection; King’s article is available as supplementary material in the online version of this introduction.