"In about 1830, Charles Lyell, Paul Deshayes, and Heinrich George Bronn independently developed a biostratigraphic technique [geologic column] for dating Cenozoic deposits based on relative proportions of living and extinct species of fossil mollusks…. Strangely, little effort has been made to test this assumption. This failure leaves the method vulnerable to circularity.“ (Stanley, Steven M., Warron O. Addicott, and Kiyotaka Chinzei, ”Lyellian Curves in Paleontology: Possibilities and...