Wonderful Life (book)

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Wonderful Life
Wonderful Life (first edition).jpg
Cover of the first edition
Author Stephen Jay Gould
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Subjects Evolutionary history of life
Burgess Shale
Publisher W. W. Norton & Co.
Publication date
1989
Media typePrint (Hardcover and Paperback)
Pages347 pp.
ISBN 0-393-02705-8
OCLC 18983518
560/.9 19
LC Class QE770 .G67 1989
Preceded by An Urchin in the Storm  
Followed by Bully for Brontosaurus  

Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History is a 1989 book on the evolution of Cambrian fauna by Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. The volume made The New York Times Best Seller list, [1] was the 1991 winner of the Royal Society's Rhone-Poulenc Prize, the American Historical Association's Forkosch Award, and was a 1991 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Pulitzer juror Joyce Carol Oates later revealed the non-fiction jury had unanimously recommended the book for the prize, but the selection was rejected by the Pulitzer board. [2] Gould described his later book Full House (1996) as a companion volume to Wonderful Life. [3]

Contents

Summary

Charles Doolittle Walcott (1850-1927), who discovered the Burgess Shale, with his children Sidney Stevens Walcott (1892-1977), and Helen Breese Walcott (1894-1965). Charles Doolittle Walcott (1850-1927), Sidney Stevens Walcott (1892-1977), and Helen Breese Walcott (1894-1965).jpg
Charles Doolittle Walcott (1850-1927), who discovered the Burgess Shale, with his children Sidney Stevens Walcott (1892-1977), and Helen Breese Walcott (1894-1965).

Gould's thesis in Wonderful Life was that contingency plays a major role in the evolutionary history of life. He based his argument on the extraordinarily well preserved fossils of the Burgess Shale, a rich fossil-bearing deposit in Canada's Rocky Mountains, dating 505 million years ago. [4] Gould argues that during this period just after the Cambrian explosion there was a greater disparity of anatomical body plans (phyla) than exist today. However most of these phyla left no modern descendants. All of the Burgess animals, Gould argues, were exquisitely adapted to their environment, and there exists little evidence that the survivors were any better adapted than their extinct contemporaries. [5]

Gould proposed that given a chance to "rewind the tape of life" and let it play again, we might find ourselves living in a world populated by descendants of Hallucigenia rather than Pikaia (the ancestor of all vertebrates). Gould stressed that his argument was not based on randomness but rather contingency; a process by which historical outcomes arise from an unpredictable sequence of antecedent states, where any change in the sequence alters the final result. [6] Because fitness for existing conditions does not guarantee long-term survival — particularly when conditions change catastrophically — the survival of many species depends more on luck than conventional features of anatomical superiority. [7] Gould maintains that, "traits that enhance survival during an extinction do so in ways that are incidental and unrelated to the causes of their evolution in the first place." [8] Gould earlier coined the term exaptation to describe fortuitously beneficial traits, which are adaptive but arise for reasons other than incremental natural selection. [9]

Gould regarded Opabinia —an odd creature with five eyes and frontal nozzle—as so important to understanding the Cambrian explosion that he wanted to call his book Homage to Opabinia. [10] Gould wrote:

I believe that Whittington's reconstruction of Opabinia in 1975 will stand as one of the great documents in the history of human knowledge. How many other empirical studies have led directly on to a fundamentally revised view about the history of life? We are awestruck by Tyrannosaurus ; we marvel at the feathers of Archaeopteryx ; we revel in every scrap of fossil human bone from Africa. But none of these has taught us anywhere near so much about the nature of evolution as a little two-inch Cambrian oddball invertebrate named Opabinia. [11]

Reception

Modern artistic rendering of Hallucigenia. H. sparsa.jpg
Modern artistic rendering of Hallucigenia.

Wonderful Life quickly climbed the national bestseller lists within weeks of publication. [12] It stimulated wide discussion regarding the nature of progress and contingency in evolution. Gould's controversial thesis was that if the history of life were replayed over again, human level intelligence would prove unlikely to ever arise again. In his review, the biologist Richard Dawkins wrote that, "Wonderful Life is a beautifully written and deeply muddled book. To make unputdownable an intricate, technical account of the anatomies of worms, and other inconspicuous denizens of a half-billion-year-old sea, is a literary tour-de-force. But the theory that Stephen Gould wrings out of his fossils is a sorry mess." [13] The evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr argued that Gould, "made such contingencies a major theme in Wonderful Life, and I have come to the conclusion that here he may be largely right." [14]

Biologist John Maynard Smith wrote, "I agree with Gould that evolution is not in general predictable. … Although I agree with Gould about contingency, I find the problem of progress harder. … I do think that progress has happened, although I find it hard to define precisely what I mean." [15] Philosopher Michael Ruse wrote that, "Wonderful Life was the best book written by the late Stephen Jay Gould, paleontologist and popular science writer. It is … a thrilling story that Gould tells in a way that no one else could equal." [16]

Some of the anatomical reconstructions cited by Gould were soon challenged as being incorrect, most notably Simon Conway Morris' 1977 reconstruction of Hallucigenia . [17] Conway Morris' reconstruction was, "so peculiar, so hard to imagine as an efficiently working beast" Gould speculated that Hallucigenia might be "a complex appendage of a larger creature, still undiscovered." [18] It was later brought to light by paleontologists Lars Ramskold [19] and Hou Xianguang [20] that Conway Morris' reconstruction was inverted upside down, and likely belonged to the modern phylum Onychophora. [21]

The ultimate theme of the book is still being debated among evolutionary biologists today. [17]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Burgess Shale</span> Fossil-bearing rock formation in the Canadian Rockies

The Burgess Shale is a fossil-bearing deposit exposed in the Canadian Rockies of British Columbia, Canada. It is famous for the exceptional preservation of the soft parts of its fossils. At 508 million years old, it is one of the earliest fossil beds containing soft-part imprints.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen Jay Gould</span> American biologist and historian of science (1941–2002)

Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was one of the most influential and widely read authors of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In 1996, Gould was hired as the Vincent Astor Visiting Research Professor of Biology at New York University, after which he divided his time teaching between there and Harvard.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lobopodia</span> Group of extinct worm-like animals with legs

Lobopodians are members of the informal group Lobopodia, or the formally erected phylum Lobopoda Cavalier-Smith (1998). They are panarthropods with stubby legs called lobopods, a term which may also be used as a common name of this group as well. While the definition of lobopodians may differ between literatures, it usually refers to a group of soft-bodied, marine worm-like fossil panarthropods such as Aysheaia and Hallucigenia.

<i>Hallucigenia</i> Genus of Cambrian animals

Hallucigenia is a genus of lobopodian, known from Cambrian aged fossils in Burgess Shale-type deposits in Canada and China, and from isolated spines around the world. The generic name reflects the type species' unusual appearance and eccentric history of study; when it was erected as a genus, H. sparsa was reconstructed as an enigmatic animal upside down and back to front. Lobopodians are a grade of Paleozoic panarthropods from which the velvet worms, water bears, and arthropods arose.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maotianshan Shales</span> Series of Early Cambrian deposits in the Chiungchussu Formation

The Maotianshan Shales (帽天山页岩) are a series of Early Cambrian sedimentary deposits in the Chiungchussu Formation, famous for their Konservat Lagerstätten, deposits known for the exceptional preservation of fossilized organisms or traces. The Maotianshan Shales form one of some forty Cambrian fossil locations worldwide exhibiting exquisite preservation of rarely preserved, non-mineralized soft tissue, comparable to the fossils of the Burgess Shale of British Columbia, Canada. They take their name from Maotianshan Hill in Chengjiang County, Yunnan Province, China.

<i>Opabinia</i> Extinct stem-arthropod species found in Cambrian fossil deposits

Opabinia regalis is an extinct, stem group arthropod found in the Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale Lagerstätte of British Columbia. Opabinia was a soft-bodied animal, measuring up to 7 cm in body length, and its segmented trunk had flaps along the sides and a fan-shaped tail. The head shows unusual features: five eyes, a mouth under the head and facing backwards, and a clawed proboscis that probably passed food to the mouth. Opabinia probably lived on the seafloor, using the proboscis to seek out small, soft food. Fewer than twenty good specimens have been described; 3 specimens of Opabinia are known from the Greater Phyllopod bed, where they constitute less than 0.1% of the community.

<i>Marrella</i> Extinct genus of Arthropods

Marrella is an extinct genus of marrellomorph arthropod known from the Middle Cambrian of North America and Asia. It is the most common animal represented in the Burgess Shale of British Columbia, Canada, with tens of thousands of specimens collected. Much rarer remains are also known from deposits in China.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Doolittle Walcott</span> American paleontologist and 4th Secretary of the Smithsonian (1850–1927)

Charles Doolittle Walcott was an American paleontologist, administrator of the Smithsonian Institution from 1907 to 1927, and director of the United States Geological Survey. He is famous for his discovery in 1909 of well-preserved fossils, including some of the oldest soft-part imprints, in the Burgess Shale of British Columbia, Canada.

<i>Pikaia</i> Extinct genus of primitive chordates

Pikaia gracilens is an extinct, primitive chordate animal known from the Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale of British Columbia. Described in 1911 by Charles Doolittle Walcott as an annelid, and in 1979 by Harry B. Whittington and Simon Conway Morris as a chordate, it became "the most famous early chordate fossil", or "famously known as the earliest described Cambrian chordate". It is estimated to have lived during the latter period of the Cambrian explosion. Since its initial discovery, more than a hundred specimens have been recovered.

Simon Conway Morris is an English palaeontologist, evolutionary biologist, and astrobiologist known for his study of the fossils of the Burgess Shale and the Cambrian explosion. The results of these discoveries were celebrated in Stephen Jay Gould's 1989 book Wonderful Life. Conway Morris's own book on the subject, The Crucible of Creation (1998), however, is critical of Gould's presentation and interpretation.

<i>Anomalocaris</i> Extinct genus of cambrian radiodont

Anomalocaris is an extinct genus of radiodont, an order of early-diverging stem-group arthropods.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elisabeth Vrba</span> American paleontologist

Elisabeth S. Vrba is a paleontologist at Yale University who developed the turnover-pulse hypothesis.

<i>Helmetia</i> Genus of arthropods (fossil)

Helmetia is an extinct genus of arthropod from the middle Cambrian. Its fossils have been found in the Burgess Shale of Canada and the Jince Formation of the Czech Republic.

A number of assemblages bear fossil assemblages similar in character to that of the Burgess Shale. While many are also preserved in a similar fashion to the Burgess Shale, the term "Burgess Shale-type fauna" covers assemblages based on taxonomic criteria only.

The fossils of the Burgess Shale, like the Burgess Shale itself, are fossils that formed around 505 million years ago in the mid-Cambrian period. They were discovered in Canada in 1886, and Charles Doolittle Walcott collected over 65,000 specimens in a series of field trips up to the alpine site from 1909 to 1924. After a period of neglect from the 1930s to the early 1960s, new excavations and re-examinations of Walcott's collection continue to reveal new species, and statistical analysis suggests that additional discoveries will continue for the foreseeable future. Stephen Jay Gould's 1989 book Wonderful Life describes the history of discovery up to the early 1980s, although his analysis of the implications for evolution has been contested.

In biology, the wonderful life theory, also known as contingency theory, postulates that after hundreds of different phyla evolved during the Cambrian period, many of them subsequently became extinct, leaving the relatively few phyla that exist today. The theory was first suggested in 1989 by Stephen Jay Gould in his book Wonderful Life.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hallucigeniidae</span> Extinct family of lobopodian worms

Hallucigeniidae is a family of extinct worms belonging to the group Lobopodia that originated during the Cambrian explosion. It is based on the species Hallucigenia sparsa, the fossil of which was discovered by Charles Doolittle Walcott in 1911 from the Burgess Shale of British Columbia. The name Hallucigenia was created by Simon Conway Morris in 1977, from which the family was erected after discoveries of other hallucigeniid worms from other parts of the world. Classification of these lobopods and their relatives are still controversial, and the family consists of at least four genera.

<i>Utaurora</i> Extinct genus of opabiniid

Utaurora is an extinct genus of opabiniid, which were bizarre stem-arthropods closely related to true arthropods and radiodonts; the type species is U. comosa. The animal's fossils come from the Cambrian of Utah. This genus is so far the only other known unquestionable opabiniid, with the other being Opabinia itself. There are other animals like Myoscolex and Mieridduryn that could be opabiniids, but the classification of those two genera is still debated.

The Cambrian chordates are an extinct group of animals belonging to the phylum Chordata that lived during the Cambrian, between 538 and 485 million years ago. The first Cambrian chordate known is Pikaia gracilens, a lancelet-like animal from the Burgess Shale in British Columbia, Canada. The discoverer, Charles Doolittle Walcott, described it as a kind of worm (annelid) in 1911, but it was later identified as a chordate. Subsequent discoveries of other Cambrian fossils from the Burgess Shale in 1991, and from the Chengjiang biota of China in 1991, which were later found to be of chordates, several Cambrian chordates are known, with some fossils considered as putative chordates.

Hou Xian-guang is a Chinese paleontologist at Yunnan University who made key discoveries in the Cambrian life of China around 518 myr. His first discovery of animal fossils from the Cambrian sediments at Chengjiang County, Yunnan Province, led to the establishment of the Chengjiang biota, an assemblage of various life forms during the Cambrian Period. The discovery of the Chengjiang biota, remarked as "among the most spectacular in this [20th] century", added to the better understanding of how animal forms originated and evolved during the so-called Cambrian explosion.

References

  1. ↑ McDowell, Edwin (1989). "Book Notes." The New York Times Nov. 8.
  2. ↑ Joyce Carol Oates [@JoyceCarolOates] (March 29, 2024). "this has happened several times--no award for fiction or drama because the judges' decisions were rejected by the Columbia committee. when I was a juror for the Pulitzer prize in non-fiction all three jurors chose Stephen Jay Gould's "Wonderful Life"--refused by the committee" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  3. ↑ Gould, S. J. (1996). Full House: The Spread of Excellence From Plato to Darwin. New York: Harmony Books, p. 4.
  4. ↑ Ward, Peter and Joe Kirschvink (2015). A New History of Life. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, p. 125.
  5. ↑ Gould, S. J. (1989) Wonderful Life. New York: Norton, p. 236.
  6. ↑ Gould, S. J. (1989). Wonderful Life. p. 283.
  7. ↑ Gould, S. J. (2004). "The Evolution of Life On Earth." Archived 2011-11-20 at the Wayback Machine Scientific American 290 (March): 97-98, 100.
  8. ↑ Gould, S. J. (1989) Wonderful Life. p. 307.
  9. ↑ Gould, S. J.; Vrba, E. (1982), "Exaptation—a missing term in the science of form" (PDF), Paleobiology, 8 (1): 4–15, Bibcode:1982Pbio....8....4G, doi:10.1017/S0094837300004310, S2CID   86436132.
  10. ↑ Knoll, A.H. (2004). "Cambrian Redux". The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth. Princeton University Press. p. 192. ISBN   978-0-691-12029-4 . Retrieved 2009-04-22.
  11. ↑ Gould, S. J. (1989). Wonderful Life. p. 136.
  12. ↑ Mehren, Elizabeth (1989). "The Cosmic Lottery." Los Angeles Times Nov. 28, pp. E1, E6.
  13. ↑ Dawkins, Richard (1990). "Hallucigenia, Wiwaxia and Friends." Sunday Telegraph Feb. 25; reprinted in A Devil's Chaplain . Boston: Houghton Mifflin, pp. 203-205. ( ISBN   978-0-7538-1750-6).
  14. ↑ Mayr, Ernst (2001). What Evolution Is. New York: Basic Books, p. 229.
  15. ↑ Maynard Smith, John (1992). "Taking a Chance on Evolution." New York Review Books 39 (May 14): 34-36.
  16. ↑ Ruse, Michael (2004). "Are we here by chance?" The Globe and Mail, Jan. 17.
  17. 1 2 Briggs, D. E. G.; Fortey, R. A. (2005). "Wonderful strife: systematics, stem groups, and the phylogenetic signal of the Cambrian radiation" (PDF). Paleobiology. 31 (2 (Supplement)): 94–112. doi:10.1666/0094-8373(2005)031[0094:WSSSGA]2.0.CO;2. S2CID   44066226. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-08-12. Retrieved 2016-12-04.
  18. ↑ Gould, S. J. (1989). Wonderful Life. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., p. 157.
  19. ↑ Ramskold, L. (1992). "The second leg row of Hallucigenia discovered." Lethaia 25 (2): 221-224
  20. ↑ Ramsköld L. and Hou Xianguang (1991). "New early Cambrian animal and onychophoran affinities of enigmatic metazoans." Nature351 (May 16): 225-228.
  21. ↑ Gould, S. J. (1992). "The reversal of Hallucigenia." Natural History 101 (January): 12-20.
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