Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History by Stephen Jay Gould

A fascinating biological saga somewhat tediously presented

Paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) wrote many books on natural history and evolution for a popular audience. His book Wonderful Life, published in 1989, focuses on fossils collected from the Burgess Shale, a geological formation in British Columbia, Canada. The remarkably preserved fossils of the Burgess Shale (I saw some in a Toronto museum last week) comprise the best illustration of the Cambrian explosion, when early invertebrate life exhibited a wide diversity of anatomical forms. Eminent paleontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott (1850–1927) discovered the Burgess Shale and for several decades monopolized the interpretation of the fossils. In the 1970s, however, three British paleontologists—Harry Whittington, Simon Conway Morris, and Derek Briggs—re-examined the Burgess Shale fossil record and ascertained that many of Walcott’s findings were erroneous. Walcott “shoehorned” several unique creatures into existing phyla, thus shortchanging the biological diversity and anatomical disparity of the Cambrian explosion. The three Brits revealed that many of the Burgess Shale arthropods belong to newly discovered phyla that led to evolutionary dead ends. Gould uses this scientific saga to illustrate his own theories of evolution and natural historiography.

The centerpiece of the book is a step-by-step recounting of Whittington, Briggs, and Conway Morris’s work with the Burgess Shale fossils. The reader follows along and joins in the excitement as they make new scientific discoveries. One thing Wonderful Life does very well is it really gives laymen like me an idea of what exactly paleontologists do and how they do it. I also learned quite a bit about the anatomy, evolution, and taxonomy of prehistoric arthropods, topics I surprisingly found fascinating.

What I didn’t like about Wonderful Life is the way that Gould continually hammers home his thesis. It reads as if he’s saying: “These three scientists discovered something marvelous, and I discovered them! Now wonder at the revelations I’m about to impart to you!” Gould keeps stressing how groundbreaking this interpretation of the Burgess fossils is, but I never fully grasped the big deal. I never really thought that our present world was any more biodiverse than earlier eras, so in my case that’s one myth Gould didn’t have to bust. Gould does make a good point that evolutionary trees are often drawn in a way that makes it seem like homo sapiens were the teleological god-given foregone conclusion in the process, but it’s not like intelligent science-minded people can’t see around that. Anyone who’s ever done any genealogical research knows that family trees are more like unruly bushes than neatly pruned trees. The same holds true for taxonomical cladograms.

The other half of Gould’s argument is his assertion that contingency plays a big role in evolution. Again, I met this hypothesis with a resounding “Duh!” Contingency, as Gould vaguely defines it, is something like what most of us might call “the butterfly effect.” Small random or haphazard incidents amount to big changes over the course of hundreds of millions of years. Gould states over and over that if we “played back the tape” of evolution with different random catastrophes, then humankind would have never evolved. That seems like a no-brainer, at least to an atheist. What Gould fails to point out is that if humanity never evolved, then there wouldn’t be any humans around to contemplate evolution. Intelligent human life may have been a one-in-a-million chance, but it’s a prerequisite for the very discussion we’re having.

Some other scientists have taken issue with Gould’s arguments here, in whole or in part, such as Richard Dawkins and Richard Fortey. Obviously, I’m not in a position to argue evolution with the late great Stephen Jay Gould. I can, however, say that Fortey is the best writer of the three, while Gould and Dawkins are rather full of themselves. I like the science that Gould presented in Wonderful Life. I just got tired of him telling me how amazed I should be at his conclusions.