Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #44920 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08-03
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The Burgess Shale of British Columbia "is the most precious and important of all fossil localities", writes Stephen Jay Gould. These 600-million-year-old rocks preserve the soft parts of a collection of animals unlike any other. Just how unlike is the subject of Gould's book.

Gould describes how the Burgess Shale fauna was discovered, reassembled and analysed in detail so clear that the reader actually gets some feeling for what paleobiologists do, in the field and in the lab. The many line drawings are unusually beautiful, and now can be compared to a wonderful collection of photographs in Fossils of the Burgess Shale by Derek Briggs, one of Gould's students.

Burgess Shale animals have been called "a palaeontological Rorschach test", and not every geologist by any means agrees with Gould's thesis that they represent a "road not taken" in the history of life. Simon Conway Morris, one of the subjects of Wonderful Life, has expressed his disagreement in Crucible of Creation. Wonderful Life was published in 1989, and there has been an explosion of scientific interest in the pre-Cambrian and Cambrian periods, with radical new ideas fighting for dominance. But even though many scientists disagree with Gould about the radical oddity of the Burgess Shale animals, his argument that the history of life is profoundly contingent--as in the movie It's a Wonderful Life, from which this book takes its title--has become more accepted, in theories such as Ward and Brownlee's Rare Earth hypothesis. And Gould's loving, detailed exposition of the labour it took to understand the Burgess Shale remains one of the best explanations of scientific work around. --Mary Ellen Curtin

Synopsis
Centres on a sensational discovery in the field of palaeontology - the existence in the Burgess Shale of 530-million-year-old-fossils, unique in age, preservation and diversity.

Customer Reviews

Not quite the revolution
The centerpiece of this book is a lively account of how the fossil animals of the Burgess Shales were shown to include several that belonged to no otherwise known group. On this basis Gould tries to build a revolutionary new view of the history of life; with different accidents a quite different array of living things would have been produced. Yes, but how different? There would still have been animals with their hard parts outside, others with their skeletons inside and others with no hard parts. There would still have been big animals and small ones, carnivores and herbivores, swimmers and crawlers and eventually those that moved on to the land. There would still have been legs and fins, eyes and feelers, nervous systems and intelligence. It would have been a different living world, but not that different - certainly not enough to sustain more than 300 pages of self-consciously stylish rhetoric.

Well, maybe but I'm not convinced
Gould writes beautifully. His style is impeccable. He also writes very clearly. The problem is what he writes.I did enjoy this book, but the arguments Gould uses to make his case for the Pre-Cambrian explosion of life-forms seems a little rushed. In the beauty of his prose it is easy to go along with generalisations that aren't actually valid. Dawkins gives a good illustration of this in Unweaving The Rainbow. Modern evolutionary theorists almost uniformly disagree with Gould's perspective, and if you don't get too carried away with his eloquence you can see why.

Worth buying for the writing alone, but cynicism is a must at all times.

Yes, Wonderful
Anyone who thinks they "know" the basic story of evolution from should read this and be challenged. The book is a discourse on evolution and a fascinating narrative of scientific discovery, but I think that the most important thing about the book is Gould's central point that our preconceived notions about science, humanity and society cause us to draw wrong conclusions from new information because we tend to "shoehorn" new discoveries into the framework of our old ideas, instead of allowing new discoveries to challenge them. Makes you question your own thought processes....