Wonderful Life
by Stephen Jay Gould
Summary
In a drawer of fossils from a quarry in the Canadian Rockies, Gould found what he argued was the most important lesson in the history of life. The Burgess Shale, 505 million years old, preserves in fine detail the soft bodied animals of the Cambrian explosion, and when three Cambridge paleontologists, Whittington, Briggs and Conway Morris, painstakingly redescribed them in the 1970s, the creatures turned out to be far stranger than the textbook story allowed: five eyed Opabinia with its grasping nozzle, Hallucigenia first reconstructed walking on its spikes, Anomalocaris the great predator, body plans, Gould argued, outside any modern group.
From that disparity he built the book's famous thought experiment: rewind the tape of life to the Cambrian and play it again, and nothing guarantees a rerun. Decimation among the Burgess designs looks like lottery rather than ladder; the survivor that led to us was nothing special at the time; and human existence is therefore a contingency, a fact of history rather than a destiny of evolution. The title takes Capra's film seriously: remove one lucky accident and the whole subsequent world unravels.
Gould tells the science through the scientists, the monograph by monograph drama of the redescription, which remains the best account of taxonomic work ever written for the public: Whittington rotating a fossil in his mind through years of camera lucida drawings is rendered as the heroism it is.
Around three hundred and fifty pages, discursive and delighted.
Best for readers who want the biggest available question, why us, argued from a drawer of fossils, by the essayist the field never replaced.
Historical Context & Significance
Wonderful Life won the Science Book Prize in 1991 and was a Pulitzer finalist, where the nonfiction jury recommended it unanimously and the board declined it, an episode this site's Pulitzer pages would recognise.
Its afterlife is the rare case of a popular book conducting a genuine scientific argument. Simon Conway Morris, the hero of Gould's telling, became the thesis's chief opponent, arguing in The Crucible of Creation that convergence, not contingency, rules evolution, and that something like intelligence was probable in any rerun; the Gould and Conway Morris exchange became a set piece debate in evolutionary theory. Meanwhile reexamination revised several of the book's strangest stars, Hallucigenia turned right way up and filed with the velvet worms, others settled into known groups, softening the disparity claim the argument leaned on.
The book survives its corrections: as an account of how paleontology actually works, and as the statement of the contingency view, it remains the classic, and the Burgess quarry became famous because of it.