Defense of Mucosal Surfaces: Pathogenesis, Immunity and Vaccines
Mucosal immunity encompasses a broad field of research that includes areas of epithelial cell and molecular biology, molecular and cellular immunology, microbiology, virology, and vaccinology. This volume presents up to date and concise discussions of con
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T. Palmer, Controversy Catastrophism and Evolution © Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, New York 1999
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Controversy-Catastrophism and Evolution gave free play to fantasy, who rashly invoked supernatural causes and allowed their geological researches to be dictated by a priori metaphysical beliefs. The uniformitarians on the other hand were sober-minded, sensihle people who, guided by the talismanic principle that 'the present is the key to the past', eventually carried all before them and routed the opposition by I heir devotion to careful study of natural phenomena and cautious, empirically well-based and logically sound inference. The true history of the controversy is a good deal more complicated and certainly more interesting. [I: p. 30]'
For many years prior co 1980 there had seemed, in the minds of Earch scientists, an inescapable association between the terms uniformitarianism and gradttalism, even though hiscorians such as Reijer Hooykaas, Marcin Rudwick, and Roy Porcer had pointed out that this should not be the case. The problem arose from words having more than one meaning [5-1O}. So, for example, in the preface co The Prll/ciple of Uniformity in Geology, Biology and Theology, Hooykaas, from the Free University of Amsterdam, drew attention to the "English-American cuscom" of using the concepf of uniformitarianism "indiscriminately" [6: p. v}. In the early 1980s, Hallam and Gould were among the very few who appeared keen co keep the issue alive, and bring it befort: a wider readership, arguing rhat rhe confusion went right back co the time of Charles Lyell in the middle of rhe nineteenth century. In one of the earlier examples of his essays, which have been a regular feature in Natural History magazine for many years (see Section 3.5), Gould claimed that Lyell, whom he called the "godfather ofgeological gradualism," had "pulled a fast one" in securing acceptance for his belief that changes ,If the Earch's surface occurred in an imperceptible fashion. He went on co explain: {Lyell] had argued, quite rightly, that geologists must invoke the invariance (uniformity) of natural laws through time in order to study the !,ast scientifically. He then applied the same term-uniformity-to an empirical daim about rates of processes, arguing that change must be slow, steady and gradual, and that big results can only arise as the accumulation of small changes. But rhe uniformity of law does not preclude natural catastrophes, particularly on a 10< al scale. Perhaps some invariant laws operate to produce infrequent episodes of suJden, profound change. {II: p. 168] That was a point that had previously been made by Hooykaas, Rudwick, and Porcer, albeit in language less flamboyant than that of Gould. Rudwick, for instance, in an essay dating from 1970, drew attention to the fact that Lyell consistently conflated two separate assertions, maintaining that "processes observable at the present day are ... accurately representative of those that have acted in the pasr, not only in kind bur also in degree," even rhough "t
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