Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

It should be called 'Four legs good, two legs better.' I read this book for a Geology report, thinking that it had to do with the odds of intelligence developing in animals if the history of the earth was replayed. Instead, I read a hundred pages of unrelated stories about Gould's good friends Whittington and his grad students. Then, at the end, human evolution is finally mentioned, but the context is all but forgotten and obscure.

In fairness, this book should be separated into two: the Burgess Shales, and the Nature of History, as the two are not connected and not relevant to each other. Indeed, most of this book is Gould trying to prove everyone else wrong, and seems so obsessed with it that he can't even prove himself right. He also fails to notice that contrary to what he would like to think, consciousness is not necessarily intelligence. Few humans today could survive in the wild, while two legged birds and primates with hands can. I do not believe that the invention of the atomic bomb was inevitable, I not believe that the invention of striped toothpaste was inevitable, nor do I believe that human consciousness was inevitable, but I do not believe that our brain size makes us any different from tadpoles that develop legs and turn into frogs. The occurrence of Homo sapiens is not the proverbial top of the todempole, nor are we the goal of evolution, which is what this author implies, but doesn't say.

Indeed, there are a lot of things he does not say, like why the Burgess shale is mentioned at all, when his thesis was stated as dealing with the evolution of consciousness. It would make a more clear point to mention the odds of a tadpole developing legs and walking on land, for the Burgess shale specimens are no different from other episodes of life on earth, and we have no way of surmising their actual methods of surviving.

I loved this book! Stephen J. Gould's, Wonderful Life is one of the best works of scientific literture I've ever read, maybe THE best! I have read most of Mr. Gould's books, from his collections of essays...Bully for Brontosaurus, Eight Little Piggies...to his one subject works...The Mismeasure of Man, Questioning the Millenium. I admit to being a fan of his! And why not? He makes science and scientific thought readable, understandable, enjoyable and just plain fun. To me, Wonderful Life is his best. He takes the story of the discovery and interpretation of the Burgess Shale and turns it into a great scientific detective story. The fossilized creatures found in the Burgess Shale will not be familiar to the average reader, but they become so thanks to Mr. Gould. Wait till you find Opabina or Anomalocaris! They aren't Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops, but this book will make you as interested in them as the Dinosaurs. Mr. Gould's writing is almost luminous. I think I could read his writing on almost any subject as he has the ability to make almost any subject interesting and fun. His conclusions are a big part of the enjoyment of Wonderful Life. What the Burgess Shale and it's fossils tell us about the distant past and about life itself. Gould's idea that if what he calls the "tape of life", could be rewound and played again, starting 500 million years ago from time of the Burgess Shale, the evolutionary outcome would be different each time...is at the heart of understanding the natural world. Evolution is not pre-ordained! Stephen J. Gould makes this idea seem almost spiritual, certainly....Wonderful! If you like Gould, if you like science, if you like LIFE, you'll enjoy Wonderful Life.

Gould's book is superb in its own way and deserves five stars for eloquence, and half a star for stubborness. Gould is adamant for contingency in evolution, but the book's fascianting exploration of the Cambrian seeking the case for this contingency in evolution is the one great instance where the puzzle, still unsolved, suggests something different, perhaps the opposite. Surely the Cambrian is the geat counterevidence to claims for natural selection in evolution. It is impossible to not smell a rat here. Bizarre creatures of all sorts are virtually popping out of the Cambrian toaster with complete body plans and we are to believe this squares with Darwin's thesis. It simply isn't convincing. I don't buy it. Genomes don't arrive like this. Nonetheless, Gould's book raises important issues of the idea of progress, and of the nature of history that, while seemingly out of place, remain dialectically poised here at the edge of verification or refutation. Part of the problem with the idea of progress is that its ideological cast from its usage in nineteenth century culture forever makes it inappropriate for the description of evolution. Yet this is only really true if we can prove that natural selection operates exclusively to produce complexity. The Cambrian looks a tad like evolutionary progression, if not progress, as a result of directed process, type unknown. As to the nature of history, what do we know about it? To assume that it occurs in a purely contingent fashion is not true either, for we can see directionality in our own history, and a very spectacular kind at that (cf. World History and the Eonic Effect, John Landon, for this demonstration). So history isn't contingent. Evolution can be contingent in one way, and directed in another, like cars at a stop light, in a mixture of processes. Surely the Cambrian demands some radically new conception of evolution, and evolution taken as a whole. The rapid appearance of such coordinated body plans in such a short era simply does not square with randomness. The literature on the Cambrian suggests a form of paradigm hysteria, frantic to cover up the stark contradiction confronting Darwinists, 'here's an elephant but I can't see anything'. As to the future of these types and body plans,their dying out or survival--this proves very little. For if the Cambrian suggests intermittency, by whatever process, a future intermittency could return on surviving body plans for a new advance, a possibility strongly suggested, but to be sure not proven, by the evidence. For we see over and over the 'restarting' from a small subset, as indeed with man, a rapid morphing of a subset, within a subset, of the great apes. Thus we are confronted with something that is neither purely contingent, nor purely progressive. This book should be complemented with such books as Simon Conway Morris' Crucible of Creation, S. Kaufman's At Home in the Universe, a work on exobiology such as Here Be Dragons, and radical computations of genomic mutational statistics such as Independent Birth of Organisms, by Senapathy. This is a most provocative book, but it convinced me that evolution is directional, sorry.