EXCERPT Spinal Catastrophism is constructible as the commixture of two venerable idea-clusters. First, the notion of Depth-as-Memory and the Law of Superposition, traceable to the seventeenth-century genesis of the geosciences; and second, embryology’s Theory of Recapitulation, also known as the Biogenetic Law, which is itself traceable to the late eighteenth-century collision of Absolute Idealism with Natural History. The convergence of these two notions, the Law of Superposition and the Biogenetic Law, furnished the matrix within which Spinal Catastrophist notions first became articulable, via a self-obsolescing exacerbation of the internal logic of two core Enlightenment Idealist tenets: the Principle of Continuity was abrogated by Superposition, and Recapitulation arose as a mutation of the Principle of Identity.…