Product Description

"Gould has brought to light one of the least known but most spectacular paleontological discoveries of all time….a brilliant tapestry."—Martin Gardner

The Burgess Shale is a small limestone quarry formed 530 million years ago. In it are the remains of an ancient sea that nurtured more varieties of life than can be found in all of our modern oceans. Stephen Jay Gould explores what the Burgess Shale reveals about evolution and the nature of history. 116 illustrations.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #58779 in Books
• Published on: 1990-09-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Amazon.com
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 analyzed 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 "paleontological 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 labor it took to understand the Burgess Shale remains one of the best explanations of scientific work around. --Mary Ellen Curtin

From Publishers Weekly
The Burgess Shale, a small quarry in the mountains of British Columbia, opened a window on the first multicellular animals. Gould, eminent life-historian and author, introduces us to the creatures of Burgess Shale and to those who have painstakingly examined them. "This is exciting and illuminating material on the beginnings of life," wrote PW. Illustrated.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
The Burgess Shale, found in the Canadian Rockies, contains an extremely important fossil fauna that includes an assortment of weird and wonderful creatures. Gould, the best-known modern exponent of paleontology and evolutionary biology, interprets, with the wit and grace his many fans expect, the significance of this 530-million-year-old fauna. His arguments entail learning some anatomy of unfamiliar creatures, but Gould gently guides the way. The book does ramble some, but the asides are so fascinating! This book is much more theoretical than Harry B. Whittington's briefer and more matter-of-fact work, The Burgess Shale (Yale Univ. Pr., 1985), another good book on the topic. This is an intellectual delight, one of Gould's best recent books. It is highly recommended for the interested layperson, as well as for students from the college level on up. BOMC, History Book Club, and Quality Paperback selections. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/89.
- Joseph Hannibal, Cleveland Museum of Natural History
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

"What had that flower to do with being white?"
In the beginning of Wonderful Life, Gould writes:

"Words, of course, must be varied, if only to eliminate any jargon and phraseology that would mystify anyone outside the priesthood, but conceptual depth should not vary at all between professional publications and general exposition. I hope that this book can be read with profit both in seminars for graduate students and-- if the movie stinks and you forgot your sleeping pills-- on the businessman's special to Tokyo."

I am not qualified to discuss whether it should be taught in graduate seminars. I am more qualified to discuss reading it on a plane, since that is exactly where I did read the book. I think for my audience type, at least, he hits the mark.

I resisted the book quite a bit in the beginning. Honestly, reading it felt a little bit like homework. The casual reader needs to pick his or her way through a variety of classifications and discussions on methodology in order to begin to understand the point(s) of the book. Once I stopped resisting and got through the necessary definition chapters, I found that I really enjoyed the book and felt as though I learned a great deal about something which I had earlier known very little.

Gould's points are both about the remnants found in the Burgess Shale and, more largely, about the role of history and bias in interpreting data. Walcott is a fascinating character, and Gould is by turns both critical and affectionate about his nature and work.

I understand that there is quite a bit of debate regarding Gould's ideas-- many people taking notion with the contingency vs. ecology discussion. I'm not arrogant enough to join that discussion. It is worth noting to future readers that although this book is by most accounts a classic in its area, it is dated and there have been a number of corrections and revisions over the years.

Recommended. At least, I liked it.

Mysteries of the Complex
I am a fan of science and have enjoyed reading many recent books by great authors like Carl Sagan, Richard Leakey, Tim Flannery, Richard Dawkins and Jared Diamond. For some reason I hadn't had the chance to get around to reading a book by the legendary Stephen Jay Gould. Therefore, when I purchased my copy of his book entitled Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, I was very excited and couldn't wait to read it. I was aware that before Gould's passing he was a promoter of science and that he was well known. However, I must confess I was extremely disappointed by this book. The first few chapters started off quite good, however, as the book progresses into the desciptions of the creatures of the Burgess Shale, I felt it becomes comes quite technical. Also, unlike the previous authors I mentioned, Gould seems to offer little in the way of explanations of some of the biological terminology that he uses in the book. Therefore, I feel that this book may be well suited for a person with a complex understanding of biology or palaeontology, however, it is not well suited for the lay person, or even a person with a slightly better than average understanding of these study areas.

Not Good
This book is quoted so often in the literature that I thought I was going to read something profound. It isn't. Conway Morris and others were right to criticize it. Not sure what all the fuss is about. As a well reasoned argument Gould missed the mark.