STRATA OR TABULAE? GEORGE MCCREADY PRICE'S CRITIQUE OF BIOSTRATIGRAPHY

George McCready Price is credited with launching the 20th-century "flood geology" movement (Numbers, 1992). His long publishing career spanned over 50 years. From the start, his publications claimed that biostratigraphers were guilty of attempting erect a "cosmogony" from limited observations combined with a priori assumptions. In Q.E.D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation (1917) Price compared the activities of geologists to those of librarians, sorting the various strata according to a completely artificial system, likened to a card index.

Price believed three classes of stratigraphic contact argued against a universal sequence to life forms: a) contact of beds of diverse periods with underlying Precambrian rocks; b) paraconformities; and c)"older" fossil assemblages overlying "younger" ones in overthrust zones. Price refused to acknowledge the phenomenon of overthrusting and treated it as a fiction. Price also reasoned that all fossil taphocoenoses were preserved discrete contemporaneous ecological assemblages. For example, coal-bearing units typically assigned to the Carboniferous, Cretaceous and Tertiary Periods were originally synchronic, representing assorted ecozones present prior to the great flood of Noah. This flood emplaced all into one package, together with other fossil assemblages (cf. Gastaldo, 1999).

Unfortunately, Price accomplished most of his geologic research by reading reports and textbooks authored by others. Lacking significant field experience, Price interpreted all sedimentary structures and textures as the result of a near-instantaneous occurrence; the sorting and shuffling of fossil assemblages he felt must have occurred during a single event. If Price could compare the systematic labors of biostratigraphers to those of librarians, then his own method resembled that of a blackjack dealer. Thus I advocate use of the term tabulae for Price's concept of bedded rock layers. Price's stratigraphic arguments would be repeated, with amplification, in influential recent-creationist works such as The Genesis Flood (1961) by Whitcomb and Morris.