Once upon a time, when I was on the path to being a geologist, I carved into the moist depths of a sandstone gorge in Clinton County, Iowa, and watched the sand crumble in my hand. I jarred it, took it back to my lab, and sorted out the grains using a sequence of sieves of varying mesh, matched it to the known sedimentary facies from different depositional environments, and realized its origins. A beach from the Silurian Period, still not entirely turned to rock.And that's when I knew that sedimentology was just as much history as scientific method.Stephen Jay Gould tells us to forget everything we think we know about evolution-- the slow, gradual processes, the eternal move upward-- and embrace a radically different vision, as reflected in the Cambrian explosion. By telling the story of how the Burgess shale came to be interpreted, we not only have a story about life on this planet, but also a story of how scientists work, and how their efforts are constantly subject to revision and flux, especially in a discipline like paleontology in which there isn't much in the way of experimentation, but there is a lot in the way of history and narrative.

Getting through Wonderful Life was an arduous exercise in critical reading. I could never be certain if what I was reading was true, or if the conclusions the author was making were safe ones.From the outset the author's bias for his subject is apparent. He explicitly states over and over that this material is a revolution, that it overturns the establishment, and that it's an incredible drama. He says that it's the most important paleontological discovery ever, and it fundamentally changes our view of life. This is before he has even begun, and immediately puts me on the defensive. My first reaction is that if an idea is indeed amazing, one probably wouldn't need to keep declaring it to be so. So why does the author feel the need to keep telling the reader how wonderful his idea is, instead of simply showing it? The writing is drab and textbook-esque, interspersed with uninhibited editorializing and grand claims. I don't know which claims to retain and which to discard as biased or inaccurateIt makes for an at once boring and exhaustingly defensive read. Wonderful Life was written at a time when the classification of the creatures in question had yet been unresolved. It takes place in the middle of a discovery and a debate, but is presented as the end of one. A quick glance on Wikipedia shows the inaccuracy of much of the taxonomic classifications in this book, which act as the crux of the author's argument. The vast majority of the ideas are not left to speak for themselves, but the author must, for every new idea, construct an opposing idea so that he may expertly dismantle it. It's tedious to listen to someone argue against ideas I don't hold. Indeed, ideas that perhaps few science-minded people hold today. His main punching bag is Charles Walcott, a prominent Christian paleontologist who died in 1927 (Wonderful Life was published in 1989). When the author sinks to the point of defending paleontology proper against its lack of respect among scientists, I'm just aghast at how petty and argumentative this book is. In one footnote the author actually says that he doesn't "like" Charles Walcott, the man. Is this a science book or a diary?Wonderful Life has some novel and valuable ideas (the book's overarching points seem sound), but they're buried beneath reams of bias, pettiness, and insecurity. By framing these ideas as a "revolution" and as a response to an amalgamation of opposing beliefs, he condemns the book to instant obsolescence. I don't want to read a book explaining why the earth isn't flat. I just want to know why the Earth IS round. At least it has sparked my interest in early life and the Cambrian explosion. The idea of these primitive segmented gene-machines adorning themselves with armor and spikes and battling to the death for sustenance and survival is very cool and somewhat disturbing, being that these creepy alien creatures are our own ancestors (in some cases).It takes a certain skill to make something so inherently interesting so boring. But then, that's not what the book is about. In the end (one at last realizes), this book is about "contingency" (the role of chance in the development of humans, or in the development of any particular path of history). The last couple of chapters are fascinating, if somewhat self-evident in today's understanding of evolution. Who would argue that HUMAN consciousness is an ordained eventuality, but someone trying to justify a belief in a god or higher purpose?The single real takeaway from the book is the idea that life had the highest degree of morphological diversity at the inception of multicellular life and has since only decreased in anatomical diversity (not to be confused with the increase in speciation over time). To be fair, that IS the subject of the book, but it's a subject that could perhaps have been elucidated with 200 fewer pages of grandstanding and petty squabbling with the scientific establishment. Wonderful Life has left me with that one interesting thought and two ringing ears.

Excellent. I wish more creationist's would take the time to read and absorb whole books like this. Unfortunately I have not found whole books written from their perspective at this level (or others referred to below). I will include here a link to HingePoints, an article I wrote last year on biblical hermeneutic. It was the beginning in a shift in perspective that was afforded by regarding biblical interpretation as malleable. The world isn't, the text isn't, but how we view it is. From here, other writings began to emerge (which I won't share here just yet.)What I find touching about Gould is that he is both honest and complete. He is sometimes irreverent, but also, tellingly reverent in his account of Walcott, the scientist/administrator who first discovered the Burgess shale. The "Lord" had placed the constraint of twenty four hours in the day also on a fellow as talented as he.Science, like farming, is hard work. You get to write it up and enjoy the goods only after you have ploughed the field all day. This is an account worth reading of the recollections of ploughing.

A book about wonder and a wonderful book. The story of the Burgess Shalefrom its initial misinterpretation to its reassessment 50 years lateris mind blowing. This limestone outcropping, which sits at an altitude of 8,000 feet in the Canadian Rockies, near British Columbia, was at equatorial sea level 530 million years ago. Its shale has revealed about 150 previously unknown arthropod genera and entirely new species with anatomies that would be unimaginable to us today had Charles Doolittle Walcott not discovered them in 1909. Gould calls these animals with their diverse anatomies "weird wonders" and explains that their broad proliferation was possible because the middle Cambrian was a time of filling the so-called "ecological barrel." In other words, it was a time of low ecological competition among animals which ultimately permitted unsuccessful anatomies to flourish for a few million years before the full panoply of evolutionary pressures (natural selection) began to eliminate the less successful designs. Another thing learned from the Burgess Shale is the imprecision of the concept "survival of the fittest." Certainly, adapting to environmental change is vital, but it's not the whole ballgame. The adapted animal also needs luck on its side, luck that it cannot possibly have any direct role in affecting. I refer to the importance of contingency. Gould calls it "decimation by lottery," and given its sway, unyielding adherence to classic evolutionary principles like gradualism etc. reveal their short sightedness.Finally, if you will accept my argument that contingency is not only resolvable and important, but also fascinating in a special sort of way, then the Burgess not only reverses our general ideas about the source of pattern it also fills us with a new kind of amazement (also a frisson for the improbability of the event) at the fact that humans ever evolved at all. We came this close (put your thumb about a millimeter away from your index finger), thousands and thousands of times, to erasure by the veering of history down another sensible channel. Replay the tape a million times from a Burgess beginning, and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again. It is, indeed, a wonderful life. (p. 289)If you're like me, one who wonders why we were set down on a speck of interstellar dust in the midst of a universe so vast we daily fail to comprehend its age and scale, this book is for you. Gould is a fabulous writer. He writes with a minimum of jargon, and concepts of any complexity he is careful to explain. But he does this without being tedious; he does it, in fact, while sharing his own boundless sense of fascination. Gould was a brilliant man, a rare amalgam of top-flight scientist, science writer, and teacher. When he died 10 years ago he left a great hole in the landscape of writers who could engagingly write for the general reader about evolutionary biology and paleontology. There is simply no one else like him working today. I'm in the process of reading all of his books. There are about 20. Highly recommended for those with an interest in science, particularly the life sciences.

This is a pinnacle in popular science writing. As Gould refers in the book, many experimental scientist like myself despise taxonomy. So I could have never thought a book mainly about taxonomical inferences and anatomical definitions would be one of my favourite books.The story of Burgess shale is fascinating, but only if you are as talented as Gould to make it fascinating. Without his spin, the content of this book can be as boring as 8th grade history book. But Gould has an unique talent of developing exhilirating tangents, giving a feeling of big picture and suspense. I think that you can give him any topic and he can spin you a passable story. Now that is writing genius.Burgess shale oddballs as Gould puts it are breathtaking for any biologist and what they say about the history of earth and life is deeply moving. The only critique I have against the book that it beats a dead horse on the effect of contingency in the evolution of life a bit too much; but maybe in the era it was written it was not that obvious. It is a must read book if you are into popular science.