Early in this century, AW proposed the theory of continental drift in hi8s now famous book, The Origins of Continents and Oceans (1915)

The basic idea was this: At some time in the distant past, all the present continents were joined into a single great land mass ("Pangaea").  The continents we see today, broke apart some 200 million years ago and drifted to their current locations over a denser substratum.

Today, this is the foundational idea of modern earth science.

When Wegener put it forth, however, the reaction of earth scientists was so intensely negative that many who might have supported him did not for fear of endangering their own scientific careers.

Wegener was like Charles Darwin in many ways:

Both undertook long and difficult expeditions when they were young (Darwin, the five year voyage on the HMS Beagle; Wegener on many arctic expeditions -- in fact, Wegener lost his life in 1930 at the age of 50 on his 4th expedition to Greenland attempting to cross from a camp on the central ice cap to a base camp on the west coast of Greenland)

They were each trained in an area of study that had little to do with that in which they made their marks (Darwin: medicine and theology with early work in geology; Wegener: Ph.D. in astronomy and became a practicing meteorologist --in 1924 was appointed to a newly created chair of Meteorology and Geophysics at the University of Graz in Austria.)

Both dealt with evolutionary ideas and their basic concepts cut across many disciplines:

"This book," Wegener writes in his forward, "is addressed equally to geodesists, geophysicists, geologists, palaeontologists, zoogeographers, phytogeographers [phyto=plant], and palaeontologists."

Wegener and Darwin brought together evidence from a wide diversity of fields and each ended up sparring with a whole range of opponents, each of whom saw them as interlopers.

Like Darwin, Wegener was not the first to come up with the theory he promoted. (The jigsaw fit of South America and Africa is obvious and was noted in Francis Bacon's Novum Organum in 1620. In 1994, a classics professor at Bard College (James Romm) traced the idea of continental drift back to a Dutch cartographer named Abraham Ortelius who proposed the idea in 1596.)

But like Darwin, Wegener was the one who developed his insight into something that could not be ignored.

Finally, like Darwin, Wegener could not prove his theory. Broad-ranging theories such as evolution and continental drift are difficult to prove. A geological theory is especially unlikely to gain much support from conventional lab experimentation, and even field observations are difficult because of the great time spans and physical distances involved. As a result, Wegener could present only indirect evidence.

A difference, though: the attacks on Wegener were not religiously based, but came from within the scientific community. [Perhaps this lack of religious fervor explains why continental drift is today recognized as a powerful picture of the earth's evolution while Darwin's biological evolution continues to be attacked as untrue by some.]

What was said of Wegener by members of the scientific community?

Many questioned Wegener's credibility as a scientist

Briton Phillip Lake complained of Wegener that "he is not seeking truth; he is advocating a cause, and is blind to every fact and argument that tells against it…It is easy to fit the pieces of a puzzle together if you distort their shape, but when you have done so, your success is no proof that you have placed them in their original positions. It is not even a proof that the pieces belong to the same puzzle or that all the pieces are present."

American palaeontologist E. W. Berry called Wegener's theory "a selective search through the literature for corroborative evidence, ignoring most of the facts that are opposed to the idea, and ending in a state of auto-intoxication in which the subjective idea comes to be considered as an objective fact."

American geologist R. Thomas Chamberlain wrote, "can geology still be considered a science if it is possible for such a theory as this to run wild."

American geologist Bailey Willis asserted that "further discussion of it merely encumbers the literature and befogs the minds of fellow students. [It is] as antiquated a pre-Curie physics. It is a fairy tale."

In 1943 (13 years after Wegener's death) American paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson remarked upon the near unanimity of feeling against the continental drift theory among scientists.

So did T. W. Gevers as late as 1950.