Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould Reviewed
The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History Get a Second Look
Mar 2, 2009
Wonderful Life - The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (Published by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, Copyright 1989 by Stephen Jay Gould, ISBN: 0-393-02705-8) examines what might have been had life on this planet taken a slightly different approach to survival during the Cambrian Era, some 530 million years ago. It also examines the possibility that our knowledge of the period might have been coloured by erroneous conclusions, hastily drawn, by the man who originally uncovered the Burgess Shale in the early Twentieth Century, if not for the work of a dedicated team of scientists who decided to reevaluate the find more than forty years later.
Dr. Charles D. Walcott and the Burgess Shale Discovery
In 1909, Dr. Charles D. Walcott and his wife were prospecting for fossils in the rugged Canadian Rockies in British Columbia when he made a discovery that should have shaken the scientific community to its core. As luck would have it, the Burgess Shale, as it would later be known, was uncovered at the end of the prospecting season and weather forced Walcott to postpone a deeper exploration of the find until the following year. The prospecting season of 1910 and several years more produced some of the most remarkable specimens that paleontology has ever seen.
Unfortunately for Walcott and by extension all of science, between the demands of his position as Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute and the then pervading view of evolution, Walcott used what Gould calls "Walcott's Shoehorn" to force the various animals from the Burgess Shale into comfortable classifications of established and well known Phyla, Classes and Subclasses. There the findings would lie for more than four decades.
Professor H. B. Whittington and the Burgess Shale Rediscovery
In 1966, Harry Whittington was drawn by the beauty and abundance of fossils in the Burgess Shale and set about to write a monograph on his then specialty, arthropods, as they appeared in the Shale. In his own words, he "expected to spend a year or two describing some arthropods" and move on. Already fifty years old, Whittington was about to embark upon a paleontological journey that would last almost two decades and rewrite the history of life on earth.
The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History or the History of Nature in the Burgess Shale
What Whittington and his team would learn over the next two decades shattered the notions of evolution as a simple "tree of life" and replaced it with a much more complex and crowded "bush". It turns out that within the Burgess Shale are specimens that represent between 15 and 20 previously unknown Phyla (modern taxonomy recognizes between 28 and 32 Phyla currently in existence on the planet), the discovery of which has forced scientists to reevaluate many aspects of evolutionary theory and rewrite the taxonomy books.
Wonderful Life makes for fascinating reading, showing the reader how any number of variables might have shaped life into something very different than modern animal and plant life, perhaps into a form that might have precluded human or humanoid life at all. It also shows the reader that some of the greatest discoveries in history might still lie undiscovered in a museum drawer somewhere, misinterpreted into unremarkable oblivion and awaiting rediscovery and reinterpretation.
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