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At the centre of Wonderful Life is
a group of strange 530-million-year-old creatures. Stephen
Jay Gould, the world's most gifted writer on evolution,
tells the story of how three British scientists rediscovered
them, and how they have shaken our view of the history of
life.
High in the Canadian Rockies is a small
quarry formed over 500 million years ago. It is called the
Burgess Shale, and it holds more varieties of life -- preserved
in fantastic fossilized detail -- than can be found in all
our modern oceans. But when the fossils were first discovered,
by the great American palaeontologist Charles Walcott, their
extraordinary significance was overlooked. Walcott could
not bring himself to see that many of these creatures bore
no relation to today's animals: to do so would have upset
his widely-shared view of evolution as a great tree of ever-increasing
diversity, and of inevitable progress culminating in human
beings.
Three Cambridge scientists looked again
at these fossils and made a quiet revolution with the finest
and most detailed reconstructions of ancient creatures in
twentieth-century palaeontology. As Gould writes, these
bug-like animals from the dawn of life 'are the Old Ones,
and they are trying to tell us something.'
What they are trying to tell us overturns
many of our most comfortable illusions about how we got
here. For instead of a pattern of ever-ascending diversity,
the denizens of the Burgess Shale force us to admit that
early life was an explosion of creativity, far surpassing
in variety of bodily forms today's entire animal kingdom.
Most of these forms were wiped out in mass extinctions;
but one of the survivors was the ancestor of the vertebrates,
and of the human race. The wonder of life is that it need
not have happened. Replay the tape of life again, starting
with the Burgess Shale, and a different set of survivors,
worthy of our science-fiction dreams, would grace our planet
today. We would not be among them.
The story of the Burgess Shale is also the
story of Stephen Jay Gould's intense personal struggle with
the nature of history. He persuades us that the theory of
evolution is powerful and true, but that there is little
'cosmic comfort' to be had from its study. The decimation
of species, and the survival of the winners, is more like
a lottery than a tree of progress. Yet the author's conclusion
is that we should find joy in our 'fragility and good fortune.'
Wonderful Life is the tale of a great
and unsung scientific breakthrough. It is Stephen Jay Gould's
masterpiece.
Stephen Jay Gould, whose books have won
many prizes, teaches biology, geology and the history of
science at Harvard University. His books include Ever
Since Darwin, The Panda's Thumb, The Mismeasure
of Man and Hen's Teeth and Horses' Toes. For over
a decade, he has brought serious issues in evolutionary
theory to life for a very large international readership.
This is Stephen Jay Gould's first full-length
work for a popular audience on the subject he has made his
own: the history of life on earth.
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