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Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
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Amazon.com Review
The Burgess Shale of British Columbia "is the most precious and important of all fossil localities," writes Stephen Jay Gould. These 600-million-year-old rocks preserve the soft parts of a collection of animals unlike any other. Just how unlike is the subject of Gould's book. Gould describes how the Burgess Shale fauna was discovered, reassembled, and analyzed in detail so clear that the reader actually gets some feeling for what paleobiologists do, in the field and in the lab. The many line drawings are unusually beautiful, and now can be compared to a wonderful collection of photographs in Fossils of the Burgess Shale by Derek Briggs, one of Gould's students. Burgess Shale animals have been called a "paleontological Rorschach test," and not every geologist by any means agrees with Gould's thesis that they represent a "road not taken" in the history of life. Simon Conway Morris, one of the subjects of Wonderful Life, has expressed his disagreement in Crucible of Creation. Wonderful Life was published in 1989, and there has been an explosion of scientific interest in the pre-Cambrian and Cambrian periods, with radical new ideas fighting for dominance. But even though many scientists disagree with Gould about the radical oddity of the Burgess Shale animals, his argument that the history of life is profoundly contingent--as in the movie It's a Wonderful Life, from which this book takes its title--has become more accepted, in theories such as Ward and Brownlee's Rare Earth hypothesis. And Gould's loving, detailed exposition of the labor it took to understand the Burgess Shale remains one of the best explanations of scientific work around. --Mary Ellen Curtin
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From Publishers Weekly
The Burgess Shale, a small quarry in the mountains of British Columbia, opened a window on the first multicellular animals. Gould, eminent life-historian and author, introduces us to the creatures of Burgess Shale and to those who have painstakingly examined them. "This is exciting and illuminating material on the beginnings of life," wrote PW. Illustrated. Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Product details
Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (September 17, 1990)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 039330700X
ISBN-13: 978-0393307009
Product Dimensions:
6.1 x 0.9 x 9.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.3 out of 5 stars
120 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#88,399 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Stephen Gould, at his best, is a marvelous science writer. The beginning of this book is utterly compelling: written with the aplomb one would expect from Gould, who describes the wonders of evolution. However, after setting up this evolutionary mystery to be solved, he breaks his promise (made earlier in the book) to clarify terms for the lay reader. As a result the second half of the book is an exercise is comparative anatomy and taxonomy that left me confused and-unfortunately-uninterested. I had to put it down and give up. And I don't give up easily. It is a shame we lost Gould at such a young age. I know he could have made this book into a more accessible one.
What a wonderful writer, scientist and educator. Gould's passion for explanation of the evidence for evolution of living things on our planet is shown here. Instead of the same old dinosaur story we find ourselves exploring life long before dinosaurs appeared. How many people even consider that there must have been life that led up to the relatively recent dinosaurs?Gould writes to be accessible to all people, certainly not just scientists. But he's also faithful to the science, patiently describing the evidence and its place in the story.Illustrations are plentiful and add greatly to the explanations.My personal favourite fossil, the amazing pikaia, is left to the end. I wanted more about this little treasure. For this I removed a star.For the rest of the book I give five stars.If you're interested in the real history of life on Earth, you'll be glad to read this. Especially if you're not a traditional scientist.
In British Columbia, Canada paleontologist Charles D Walcott made the discovery of a lifetime. The year was 1909 and Walcott's field season was just winding down when he and his team began finding fossils in the Burgess Shale formation of the Rocky Mountains. Over the next 15 years Walcott collected thousands of strange and unusual fossils that he considered to be ancestral to all of our modern day phyla. In Wonderful Life, Stephen Jay Gould traces the history of this incredible find and comes to some controversial conclusions of his own. The book, published in 1989, was a best seller and won the Aventis prize for science books in 1991 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in that same year. Some of Gould's colleagues agreed with his conclusions, some did not. The resulting debates went on for years and, on some points, continues to this day. Although some of his original examples were later invalidated by newer research, his main theme is still a matter of some contention. Anyone who has read Gould's monthly essays in Natural History magazine knows that he is an accomplished writer for the interested layperson and Wonderful Life is no exception to that rule. Some 50 years after Walcott's time, in the late '60s a team of of modern scientist led by Harry Whittington did a extensive rework of Walcott's original study resulting in new insights on the biology of these long dead animals. Gould does a detailed accounting of the methodology and technics used in that study. Some of Whittington's findings agreed with Walcott's and some did not, but from this layman's point of view, it made for fascinating reading. A good part of the book addresses some long standing questions in paleontology. Multicellular animals make their first appearance in the fossil record with the Cambrian Explosion and with the Ediacara fauna. How did life get to that point? Did evolution proceed from a simple beginning that, over time, became more complex and diverse? Or did one-celled life first evolve, in a kind of explosion, into many varieties of multi-celled organisms, only a few of which survive today? Did Walcott "shoehorn" his fossils into modern phyla? Were some of the Burgess Shale animals just dead ends that were out competed in the race for survival? The answers to these questions depend on who is doing the analysis and who is doing the asking. In paleontology the study of fossils is like having an obscure, imperfect view of reality and it's only with time and further study that we can get closer to the truth. Wonderful Life is a great book that will give you one mans view on the nature of history and of life.LastRanger
This is a great scientific book that helps explain an apparent contradiction in evolution. Why are there so few but vastly different animal types in the world today? A jellyfish seems to have little in common with a song bird. And yet it iseasy to identify and name the leg bones of a T Rex from hundreds of millions of years ago because the bone structure is virtually identical to humans. The answer seems to be random physical events for which particular characteristicsof life forms have particular survival value. Thus evolution is not a steady march toward perfection but a journey through time interrupted by physical events that semi-randomly select for particular life forms.
Awesome book! It was my first foray into Gould's work, but after I made a visit to Yoho Natl. Park on a trip to Banff and heard about the invertebrate fauna in a historcial geology course, I had to learn more about it, and I'm glad I picked up this book. It is so eloquently written and every argument is highly structured, I really enjoyed reading it. For reference, I'm an engineering student with an interest in geology, so don't be put off by tales of extreme taxonomy or cladistics, it's all spelled out to the point where you can understand the important features and get a feeling for the whole story of the Burgess.
Excellent book! Stephen Jay Gould is a master when it come to taking a very complicated issue and boiling it down to an understandable point. His style of writing keeps the book flowing and easily readable. His topic is one that is usually way above the average person's head, but he brings it down to earth and doesn't insult you as he does it. Enough information and scientific conclusions to be useful to the more advanced reader or student.
One of my favourite books. Whenever I read these types of books, or books on history, I feel as though I am in a time machine going back to these places and time periods. Reading this book, I imagined myself wading through a shallow beach discovering and examining all these weird and wonderful creatures. Wow!
I had no idea that fossils could be so neat. Goes through the politics of administration, the struggles of excavation and the evolution of life on earth with ease. I don't even remember why I read this book, but I loved it.
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