Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale And The Nature Of History (1990) - Plot & Excerpts
There's been a revolution in evolution. A number of them, in fact. If you've been keeping a vision of the perfection of life forms through a crude survival-of-the-fittest paradigm in the back of your intellectual closet, it's time to toss that out for a new model. The revolution examined in Wonderful Life had taken place between 1966 and 1989, when Gould wrote this National Best Seller to stir up some public awareness of the importance of this revision of the history of nature. In fact it becomes an argument about the nature of history itself; subtitled The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, the book is built around a chronology of discoveries from a British Columbia fossil bed entitled the Burgess Shale. Fossils were taken from the bed as early as 1909, but full studies didn't begin until 1966. Within the next twenty years it had become apparent that these fossils directly contradicted the evolutionary story as it has been told in diagram, picture, diorama and prose since Darwin first proposed "descent with modification." NOTE: Because of the importance and ineffability of geological dates and distances, I am going to use numerals instead of the stylistically preferred words, perhaps to increase the impact or memorability.Our general sense of the narrative unintentionally sees the earth's history as human history, i.e., from then and them to us. Another way to understand it is to see that it lays out phylogeny (the evolution of new life forms) as if it were similar to ontogeny (the gestation process for an individual creature). That is to say, we think of the coming-to-be of any sexually reproduced life as a union of 2 cells, becoming 4, becoming 8, becoming 16, etc., the coordination and complexity increasing with the number of connections. In a similar way we picture the history of life as a one-celled creature (Prokaryotes) "becoming" a two-celled creature (Eukaryotes) and soon (in geological time) producing multicelled creatures who then "produce" more and more complex creatures, like a family tree going from old and primitive to new and complex (humans). The problem with this vision is that, of course, the one-celled creatures still dominate the world: bacteria and blue-green algae. Land creatures didn't succeed fishes the way one government succeeds another; land creatures came in addition to the water world. And in fact insects may be the major "success" story as far as survival and certainly numbers. There is of course another strain of false ideation in our sense of life's history. We explain why more complex and "higher" creatures come into being, and "replace" ancestral forms, we answer Progress. And usually the story includes lots of words like "conquered," "bested," "drove out," "vanquished." This strain comes from social Darwinism, and is not inherent in the concept of evolution as a word meaning change, without a sense of teleology or improvement. It was why Africans were slaves: they had not "progressed," as the native peoples of the American continents also were still "primitive" and their societies were not "complex," and so we "conquered" because we stand for Progress. Enslavement and genocide are facts of history; progress is more questionable, and is certainly not part of evolutionary biology.The analysis of Burgess Shale fossils underlines both of these notions, at least enough to make this book a must-read, if for no other reason than the fact that social Darwinism is alive and well in the neo-conservative and fundamentalist attacks on human rights and equality. I'll do my best to spell out why the discoveries of little creatures in prehistoric times matters today. For one thing, the Burgess Shale contains fossils of soft body parts; one of the problems with the fossil record had always been the difficulty finding fossils for creatures without hard parts: bones, shells, carapaces. Discoveries subsequent to 1989 involve new technological equipment, but the Burgess Shale (and since Gould's book more and more discovered sites) provided uniquely the peculiar conditions in which soft body parts did not decay and disappear. The fossils also lie in geological time at the most fascinating period in life's evolution: the Cambrian Explosion. Imagine this scenario: the earth is 4.5 billion years old (a wild approximation) and the first living creatures don't "occur" until 1 billion years later. One-celled creatures. And then? Another 2 billion years before there is two-celled life. Out of a history of 4.5 billion, it was 3 billion years before there were two-celled creatures. That's two-thirds (2/3) of earth's existence. Then another half-billion years pass with no significant change. Suddenly (in geological time), only an estimated 570 million years ago, the Cambrian Explosion ends the Paleozoic Era. The Cambrian is only 5 million years long, which is inconceivably long, but only a gasp in 4.5 billion. In case your math is shaky, a billion is 5,000 million, not 500 or 50 or 5. 5 million years is .01% of a billion. A relative jiffy. In this marvelously brief period every basic life form yet known "exploded" into being. The ancestors of every known phylum developed. (See Gould's Dinosaur in a Haystack for a number of accessible essays that confront the Cambrian Explosion, attempts to disprove the burst of life forms in such a short time, and their ultimate failure.) And from then on life forms proliferated.At least that was the story until the Burgess Shale creatures tweaked this somewhat. At top count in 1989 there were 32 phyla--the major divisions of animal life forms like sponges, coral, arthropods, mollusks, echinoderms, and chordates (or vertebrates and their kin). But the unexpected discovery from the Burgess fossils in 1966-1989 was the presence of from 15 to 20 creatures so different from anything living and from each other that each might represent a distinct phylum. I.E., instead of 32 phyla, 52. But those "other" creatures have no descendants. No other phylum from the Cambrian has disappeared besides Trilobites which died in the biggest extinction of history. (I won't bother with when or what it's called, but it wiped out 96% of all marine species, and the Trilobite phylum completely.) Until 1989 that was the only phylum that ever disappeared. Now we know that 15-20 phyla disappeared "without issue." Well before the great extinctions.It takes Gould 323 pages of clear and stimulating prose to communicate how stunning and how surprising and even puzzling this news was to biologists and to evolutionary theory. Briefly, since the Shale preserves soft parts the newly discovered animals can be compared in some detail to the others contemporary with them, the ones who "had issue." There is absolutely no hint of why one form should survive and another die out. There is nothing more primitive about the ones that did not survive. Evolutionary theory has always had a tendency to consider survivors as superior (a tendency Gould opposed throughout his career), a sense that survivors were "more complex" and "adaptable." The illustrations are excellent, and it is marvelous to study these non-survivors in their intricate and fascinating detail—e.g., five eyes, sweeping horns and shields, intricate probosces and appendages. And to follow Gould's theory that their extinction without "descent" is inexplicable. Other evolutions we believe follow climate and chemical changes in the environment: volcanic activity, ice ages, the drying of an ecology. But there was no such change in the Cambrian. Inexplicable is the word. Contingency is Gould's favorite. We "complex" humans were not destined to be. Every fork in the road is only partly determined. Evolution is not purposeful. History is contingent.We now know (discovered during roughly the same period as the Burgess fossils) that a great extinction 65 million years ago was caused by the collision of the earth with a large meteorite or comet, some six miles across. It is easy to see why the atmosphere then laid down a thick layer of clay in the stratigraphic record and that this fallout would most impact the breathing and feeding of the largest animals. The (non-flying) dinosaurs all died, not gradually but in a geologically very short time. After this extinction, mammals, most of which had been small prey, began to flourish. But dinosaurs had been the major land animals for over 150 million years. Without that collision in space, where would we be? It's an unsettling contingency. When fitness is equated with superiority, and fitness is defined as survival, something quite twisted happens in human minds. But survival is not always fitness, and here history begins to teach us something really significant. Read this book. Read a number of his books. It's a little difficult to know where you are if you read them in non-chronological order; Gould's books started in 1977, and several more have been published since his death in 2002, so theories and discoveries change. But it's all vastly fascinating.PS: A nice synthesis of Gould's general theory from a 1994 Scientific American article is available online at "http://brembs.net/gould.html." It includes an illustration of the Burgess shale fossils. (I don't know how to make this function as a link.)
For anyone in the dark, the Burgess Shale is one of the greatest fossil discoveries in palaeontological history. Uncovered in British Columbia by Charles Doolittle Walcott, one of America's most distinguished scientific minds, the Burgess Shale contained an astonishing diversity of forms - but most significantly, from a time at which no solid evidence for life had yet been found.Palaeontology had suffered from a critical absence in the fossil record. Dinosaurs, trilobites and many other extinct lifeforms had long been known of, of course, but while the hard body parts of dead creatures make for good fossilisation, the soft do not, tending to decay long before they can leave their mark. The sorry fact was that, prior to the Mid-Cambrian period (over five hundred million years ago), fossil evidence simply was not to be found. Whatever creatures had existed before the evolution of such hard structures as bone, chitin or shell, they had left no clue behind....until 1909. In the years that followed, C.D. Walcott collected nearly ninety thousand fossils, and though his time in the field was hampered by wide-ranging commitments as an administrator and leader of several of his country's most significant scientific bodies, he somehow found the time to study and report on his discovery as well. What he had found was nothing less than what the palaeontological community had longed for: evidence of simpler forms of life, early links in the chain that, over millions of years, would eventually produce fish and insects, amphibians and reptiles, birds, mammals and man.Or, do I hear you cry, DID he?Nearly sixty years after Walcott's discovery an Englishman named Harry Whittington, the world's leading expert on trilobites, began a process which would shine new light on a subject long considered as fact. With the help of a small group of allies they began to uncover details of the Burgess artefacts never before recognised; details which challenged Walcott's accepted wisdom regarding what his discoveries were; details which even called into question the basic nature of the evolutionary process itself.Whittington and his fellows proved with their efforts that, contrary to the traditional notion of simple creatures gradually improving over time, early evolution represented a chaotic period of sophisticated experimentation, with only blind chance in control of which forms of life would survive to define the future.Or, do I hear you cry, DID they?In Wonderful Life, Stephen J. Gould takes us on a remarkable journey. Setting the scene with an examination of our expectations in conventional evolutionary theory, we join him with Walcott on the Canadian slopes, then follow the various players as they reveal the unseen for the first time, or unveil it anew. He celebrates both the pioneer and the revolutionaries for, he claims, achievements to rank beside any undertaken by the more recognised "hard" sciences.He examines, with appropriate respect, how Walcott could make such a critical mistake regarding his subjects, how it was effectively impossible for him to conceive of an alternative to the notion of slow but inevitable "upward" development. In fact the revisionist work to come didn't utilise amazing breakthroughs of thought or technology. Nothing that was done in the 70s and 80s was beyond Walcott's technical capacities - but as a product of his time and place he was simply predisposed to see what he wanted or needed to see, so he did.Finally, after leading us through a fascinating and surprisingly accessible education in the field of ancient evolution, Gould demonstrates how these revelations about early life hang the probability of our own existence in a frighteningly - or, to another palate, thrillingly - slender thread.Or, do I hear you cry, DOES he?Because, not to put too fine a point on it, not everyone agrees with Gould's conclusions - even the visionaries he celebrates in the book. Subtitled The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, Gould's overview of the re-examination of palaeontology's crown jewel begins as a heartfelt celebration of the scientific method and ends as, arguably, an overenthusiastic departure towards his belief in mankind's unlikeliness, and a variation on the standard evolutionary theory which is far from universally accepted. However, between and through these extremes, he treats us to an engaging, enthusiastic and entertaining experience, and it is for this that the book will continue to deserve a readership, even if some of his conclusions draw fire from various detractors as time marches on.It should not be assumed though that the book is closed on Gould's perspective, that He Was Wrong and That Is That. Ten minutes of layperson level browsing underlined for me that there remains debate; and while some of those lined up in opposition to Gould's claims are pretty big guns of the scientific world, even amongst them there is great respect for his writing - and that there can be disagreement and simultaneous support for his work is as interesting to me as his argument itself.It would be nice, reassuringly so, if every science writer, presenting and then interpreting evidence, could be shown to produce undeniable fact; to raise the bar for others to jump from, not at; but this isn't what science necessarily does. Science may be just a system of beliefs no different from any other, religious or not, and as such just as fallible - no, infinitely more so, as for science the facts may sometimes show the beliefs to be wrong.Subject to the righteous threat of constant revision, every theory may eventually come apart at the how it seems - but if great theories give rise to great books only for greater theories to take their turn, then it's a small price to pay to have such good things to read while we wait for the next in line. Gould would, I think, happily accept this form of progressive improvement over time, if no other.
What do You think about Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale And The Nature Of History (1990)?
In the movie It's A Wonderful Life, George Bailey tells Uncle Billy that the three most exciting sounds are of anchor chains, plane motors, and train whistles. To me, one is that of a page being turned. Books transport you into periods and worlds that you can never hope to visit, most existing in either the past or the heads of their authors.Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould focuses on two periods. One spans roughly 70 years since 1909 when C D Walcott discovered the Burgess Shale fossils in the Canadian Rockies. Walcott, in Gould's memorable words, shoe-horned every last Burgess animal into a modern group, viewing the fauna collection as a set of primitive or ancestral versions of later, improved forms. The view remained largely unchallenged until the 1970s and '80s, during which time H B Whittington, D Briggs, and S C Morris published painstakingly researched papers that significantly revised the fossil groupings. Some fossils have still not found a place in known existing or extinct groups.The other period is the Middle Cambrian epoch on the geological timescale. The Cambrian period is well known for the Cambrian Explosion, the relatively accelerated evolution of more complex forms of life over a timeline of just 10-80 million years. The Burgess Shale fossils date from around 505 million years ago, placing them squarely in the Middle Cambrian epoch and just after the Explosion. The value of the Walcott discovery is the astonishing range of fossils found in the shale, and their near complete preservation. In an ecological study of the find described by Gould, Morris cites the following statistics- 73300 specimens collected- Nearly 88% animals- 86% soft bodied, 14% with shells- 119 genera in 140 speciesGould uses the two events to illustrate some of his controversial ideas. He argues that an important lesson from Burgess Shale is that chance plays a major role in evolution. In his own words, current patterns were not slowly evolved by continuous proliferation and advance, but set by a pronounced decimation (after a rapid initial diversification of anatomical designs), probably accomplished with a strong, perhaps controlling, component of lottery. Richard Dawkins, in a review of the book, praises the form (and some content - he says Gould makes worm anatomy descriptions unputdownable) but tears into the themes that Gould weaves - that much larger diversity prevailed in "Burgess Shale times" than exists today, that this contradicts current thinking and that evolutionists should be shocked by Gould's conclusion.The book, as Dawkins found, is captivating. The story of the fossil discovery, its misinterpretation and the subsequent research that corrected it all read as close as one can get to a paleontological thriller. Gould is often eloquent, and always interesting, even as he goes into the anatomical details of the curious creatures - A five eyed, long proboscis-bearing, 3-4 inch creature called Opabinia regalis that evoked general hilarity when Whittington first showed it to the Paleontological Association of Oxford; Anomalocaris canadensis named before Walcott discovered parts of it in Burgess Shale (the name didn't prevent Walcott mistaking the different parts as either entire animals in themselves or parts of other animals); Hallucigenia sparsa, a bizarre creature with seven pairs of stilts on one side of the trunk and seven tentacles on the other (portrayed in the book according to prevailing convention as walking on the stilts, while newer finds in China indicate that there might be a second set of tentacles with claws which are the legs. The stilts are on top acting as defence mechanisms!). The Smithsonian has a gallery of specimens from the Burgess Shale.It has been a long while since I got into this much biological detail, and Gould doesn't shy away from technical descriptions. I am glad I stuck with it though, and recommend the book to anyone who wants to know what kind of shenanigans life was up to 500 million years ago. Needless to say, the Darwin Wars are just one illustration of what shenanigans life is up to now. Long may we shenanigate.Gould named the book after the movie, to emphasize how chance and contingency influence evolution.
—Sdsouza
I started this read from an audio book, which was a big mistake. It's too hard to follow the verbal description without illustrations.This is a crazy new concept. It provides a whole new twist to the theory of evolution. It basically turns evolution upside down and says, at least for marine arthropods, The Cambrian Explosion had more unique life forms than at present. The Theory of Evolution argues for an increase in complexity from simple life forms to more complex over geologic time. The Burgess Shale had many more phyla of arthropods than at present--all with crazy and sometimes complex designs.The title gets it origin from the Frank Capra/Jimmy Stewart movie. Remember when Jimmy has this dream and comes back to his town and finds it changed as a result of a single event. All the people are different. They are all living totally different lives. Stephen Jay Gould argues for the role that chance has played in the evolutionary process. In other words, if we could start over from the time of The Burgess Shale, evolution most likely would progress in a totally different direction. If an intelligent creature like man were to evolve, he most certainly wouldn't look like us now.This is a tough read for a non biologist, but one that will challenge your thinking about man and evolution if you can get by the taxonomy.
—Cromagon
1989, Rosemary lent it to me and I bought a copy for Ugo.Really interesting, what a guy! I learned a lot about fossils, paleontology, the significance of the Burgess Shale finds, but also that paleontology [along with other non-'exact' sciences] is looked down upon by some as 'just history'.Gould says, yes it's history and history is important! And just because it's not predictive doesn't mean it's not rigorous and verifiable.I was so ignorant I did not even know 'arthropods' is the name of the phylum containing insects.The 24-plus different 'body plans' of arthropods found in the Burgess led to the realization that, instead of ancestors of modern phyla [and body plans] being the principal forms of life in Cambrian times, here we see 24 different plans, all equally viable and complex, and yet only 4 survived up to today. So instead of proceeding from simple to complex, evolution seems to have proceeded from a great earlier variety, which was decimated [at least twice] in mass extinctions -- resulting in much less diversity [in terms of major 'body plans'] today than in early Cambrian times.Gould argues for CHANCE [he calls it contingency] playing a huge role in evolution and in which forms of life survive[d] or not."Why do people deny this, and look to evolution for a justification of our existence? Gould argues that our deep-seated belief in evolution as progress 'comes from a simple want for comfort and solace from science'. We should abandon this bit of cosmic arrogance and face up to the fact that we're jolly lucky to be here."Gould's narrative of Charles Walcott's finding and interpreting of the Burgess fossils, and the work of Whittington, Briggs and Conway Morris on them much later, is fascinating. He says a lot about their personalities and working habits and how they interact with their science. And Gould notes that great administrators - like Walcott directing the Smithsonian - are rare and valuable - and usually forgotten as soon as they die.
—Rita
