Earth in Upheaval

Earth in Upheaval (a best seller) by Immanuel Velikovsky (1895 – 1979) is a book that makes you puzzled how secular main stream scientists managed to hide and ignore all the evidence of catastrophism provided in this book. It is a classical geology book, however, unlike geology, the data in it do not weather or change dramatically. It was first published in 1956, then published several times without any change in the contents. Its publication, together with that of Worlds in Collisions by the same author (1950) caused an upheaval in the world of academia. Main uniformitarian scientists were completely against the science in them to the point that they wanted to boycott the publisher and ban it. Before we review the book, let’s shed some light on the author.
Velikovsky was a Jewish, Russian-American psychiatrist, writer, and catastrophist. He was one of the last high castles in catastrophic geology. His theories of catastrophism created many enemies to him till now, and they use his publications as typical examples of pseudoscience and demarcation issues.
In his book under review, he does not declare his position as a creationist, probably the term was not yet coined or become popular, but he refers regularly to Noah’s flood and the young age of Earth. He debuts in a meticulous scientific methodology the Lyell’s’ uniformitarian theory and Darwin’s Evolution theory. In this regard, he disproved the mechanism of evolution through natural selection and survival of the fittest and mutations. He claimed that observation of life changing in the fossil record happens simultaneously through out the world, abruptly and with no intermediate forms. Extinction of fauna also leads to the same points, that it happens to so many animals across the entire world, suddenly, at the same time and not that they were not fit or the environment was lacking.
He collected vast evidence from the four corners of earth and from many geological subdisciplines to prove the theory of catastrophism. He drove, for example evidence from Alaska, Russia, China, India, Ivory Islands, UK, Antarctica, Columbia and S America, The Sahara and Arabia, Africa, Australia …
He also showed evidence of catastrophism through orogeny and tectonics, sedimentation and sedimentary processes, oceanography and limnology, paleontology and speleology, biology, magnetic reversals, history, anthropology and archaeology, etc. …
Though I do not necessarily agree with all his interpretations, I strongly recommend reading it.