TO: Tuppence
I think you make a great point here and we can see it echoed in the science literature.
Here are some quotes which echo your initial post to the thread:
"A great deal has changed, however, and contemporary geologists and paleontologists now generally accept catastrophe as a 'way of life' although they may avoid the word catastrophe... The periods of relative quiet contribute only a small part of the record. The days are almost gone when a geologist looks at such a sequence, measures its thickness, estimates the total amount of elapsed time, and then divides one by the other to compute the rate of deposition in centimeters per thousand years. The nineteenth century idea of uniformitarianism and gradualism still exist in popular treatments of geology, in some museum exhibits, and in lower level textbooks....one can hardly blame the creationists for having the idea that the conventional wisdom in geology is still a noncatastrophic one." DAVID M. RAUP, Chicago Field Museum, Univ. of Chicago Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin (Vol.54, March 1983), p.21
"Of late there has been a serious rejuvenation of catastrophism in geological thought." W. Bahngrell Brown, 1974, "Induction, Deduction, and Irrationality in Geologic Reasoning, " Geology 2:456.
"The profound role of major storms throughout geologic history is becoming increasingly recognized." Dag Nummendal, 1982, "Clastics," Geotimes 27(2):23.
"It is a great philosophical breakthrough for geologists to accept catastrophe as a normal part of Earth history." Erie Kauffman, 1983, quoted in Roger Lewin, "Extinctions and the History of Life," Science 221:935-937.