Thories on Evolution.. Catastrophism..

George Cuvier has also proposed a theory on evolution. It is the Catastrophism. This theory suggests that changes in the size of the earth's animal population was the outcome of a series of natural disasters or catastrophes, such as volcanic eruptions which killed fauna in a certain area.. Catastrophism would ultimately change the way the world viewed evolution, and would be the first of many later evolutionary theories of its kind.

Catastrophism is the theory that Earth has been affected by sudden, short-lived, violent events that were sometimes worldwide in scope. The dominant paradigm of geology has been uniformitarianism (also sometimes described as gradualism), but recently a more inclusive and integrated view of geologic events has developed resulting in a gradual change in the scientific consensus.

Many think that the history of Catastrophism was from the Creationism view. It was believed that it was the cause of development and creation. One great example is the Great Flood which was told in the bible.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the great French geologist and naturalist Baron Georges Cuvier proposed what came to be known as the Catastrophe theory or Catastrophism. According to the theory, the abrupt faunal changes geologists saw in rock strata were the result of periodic devastations that wiped out all or most extant species, each successive period being repopulated with new kinds of animals and plants, by God's hand. [Charles] Lyell rejected so nonscientific a hypothesis (as did James Hutton before him), and replaced it with the notion that geological processes proceeded gradually - all geological processes. (Lewin, 1993)

Considering Catastrohism in various events:

• Scientists have been thinking whether the extinction of dinosaurs was due to the 10-km asteroid that struck the Earth 65 million years ago at the end of Cretaceous period. It wiped out 70% of species including the dinosaurs leaving a boundary called the K-T LIne.
  
• Modern theories also suggest that Earth's anomalously large moon was formed catastrophically. In a paper published in Icarus in 1975, Dr. William K. Hartmann and Dr. Donald R. Davis proposed that a stochastic catastrophic near-miss by a large planetesimal early in Earth's formation approximately 4.5 billion years ago blew out rocky debris, remelted Earth and formed the Moon, thus explaining the Moon's lesser density and lack of an iron core. See giant impact theory for a more detailed description.