Tags: Earth, plate tectonics
Categories: Pseudo-explanations
An example of anthropomorphism in public science discourse:
"It comes from plate tectonics. So, essentially the earth has one objective, it has had one objective for four and half billion years, and that's to cool down. We're a big lump of rock floating in space, and it's got all this primordial energy, so we are going right back here, there's all this primordial energy from the the material coming together, and it's trying to cool down."
Dr James Hammond
Dr James Hammond (Reader in Geophysics at Birkbeck, University of London) was speaking on an episode ('Seismology') of 'In Our Time'. (Read 'The earth's one long-term objective'.)
Read examples of anthropomorphism in science
