Modern geoscience relies on fundamentals derived as much as a century ago under the severe constraints on observational knowledge of those early days. Brilliant geophysical and geochemical technology today depends for its application on 19th century geology, the principles of which fail to take into account new observational knowledge. From cold fusion to the red shift, much has been written opining the resistance to new ideas in science. Incongruent new data are ignored when theory fails to support observation. Instead of dealing with the fundamentals, scientists prefer to tinker with existing theory.
I will discuss two antique geological ideas that prevail despite evidence that they should be relegated to the archives; first, the concept that granitoid rocks have exclusively magmatic-intrusive origins and its corollary, the fiction that there is no possibility for sedimentary-type, clastic lithologies within or below a granitoid body unless tectonics has placed them there, and second, the attribution of hydrocarbon origins exclusively to biomass degradation, and its corollary, the notion that hydrocarbons only originate in sedimentary rock where biomass could have accumulated, never beneath it in the crystalline basement or plastic mantle of our planet.
