The geneticist Edoardo Boncinelli recently gave a series of lectures at Bologna University on the theory of evolution, its origins and developments, and I was struck not so much by the now incontrovertible evidence about evolutionism, in its neo-Darwinian form, as by so many naïve and confused ideas, not just among those who oppose it but those who agree. For example, take the idea that according to Darwinism man is descended from the apes. (One is perhaps tempted, given instances of racism in our time, to respond as Dumas did to an impudent Parisian who made an ironic remark about his mixed blood: “I may perhaps be descended from the apes, but you, sir, are reverting to one.”)
Science always has to deal with public opinion, which is less evolved than one imagines. As educated people, we know that the Earth revolves around the Sun and not vice versa, and yet in our daily life we display a naïveté of perception and happily say that the Sun rises, is high in the sky, sets. But how many “educated” people are there? A survey carried out in 1982 by the magazine Science et Vie showed that one in three French people thought the Sun went around the Earth.
I take this news from Les Cahiers de l’Institut (2009), the publication of a national institute for studying and investigating fous littéraires, namely, all those more or less crackpot authors who put forward improbable theories. France leads the field, and I have considered the literature on the subject in two previous articles, as well as on the death of its leading expert, André Blavier. But in this issue of Les Cahiers de l’Institut, Olivier Justafré looks at those who deny the terrestrial movement and spherical form of our planet.
That the Copernican theory was still being denied at the end of the 1600s, even by eminent scholars, comes as no surprise, but the number of studies published in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is quite remarkable. Justafré limits himself to French publications, but these are more than enough, from Abbé Matalène, who demonstrated in 1842 that the Sun was only thirty-two centimeters in diameter, an idea put forward by Epicurus twenty-two centuries earlier, to Victor Marcucci, according to whom the Earth was flat, with Corsica at its center.
We might make allowances for the nineteenth century, but Essai de rationalisation de la science expérimentale, by Léon Max, was printed in 1907 by a reputable scientific publishing house, and La terre ne tourne pas was published in 1936, written by one Bojo Raïovitch, according to whom the Sun is smaller than the Earth but larger than the Moon, though Abbé Bouheret in 1815 had claimed the opposite. In 1935, Gustave Plaisant, who describes himself as an ancien polytechnicien, published a work with the dramatic title Tourne-t-elle? (Does It Turn?), and as late as 1965 there was a book by Maurice Ollivier, another ancien élève of the École Polytechnique, arguing once again that the Earth is fixed in place.
Outside France, Justafré’s article refers only to the work of Samuel Birley Rowbotham, which shows that the Earth is a disk with the North Pole at its center, 650 kilometers away from the Sun. Rowbotham’s work was published in 1849 with the title Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Is Not a Globe, but over a period of thirty years his book expanded to 430 pages and led to the creation of a Universal Zetetic Society, which remained in existence until World War I.
In 1956, a member of the Royal Astronomical Society, Samuel Shenton, founded the Flat Earth Society to continue the legacy of the Universal Zetetic Society. NASA photographed the Earth from space in the 1960s, and at that point no one could continue to deny that it was spherical. Shenton, however, claimed that such photographs could only delude an untutored eye: the entire space program was a sham, and the Moon landing a cinematic illusion aimed at deceiving the public with the false idea of a spherical Earth. Shenton’s successor, Charles Kenneth Johnson, continued to denounce the plot against Flat Earthers, writing in 1980 that the idea of a revolving globe was a conspiracy against which Moses and Columbus had fought. One of Johnson’s arguments was that if the Earth were a sphere, the surface of a great mass of water would have to be curved, whereas he had tested the surfaces of Lake Tahoe and the Salton Sea and had found no curvature.
Is it any surprise, then, that there are still antievolutionists around?
2010