Wonderful Life

I loved this book because I think it is a masterpiece on the contingency of evolution and our presence.

Rewind the tape of life and times and you will get different endings: that’s a great message of freedom for me. The epic of diversity that led to the explosion of multicellular life forms in the early Cambrian concerns us too. Unmissable.

This book brings alive, in startling details, the remarkable explosion of multicellular life in the Cambrian period.

600 million years ago, all life on Earth was unicellular microbes. A few tens of millions of years later and the world was teeming with a fantastic diversity of animals. Gould challenges the notion of a predictable and linear evolutionary path and argues instead that chance events and contingency played a crucial role in shaping the course of evolution.

But what I really love is Gould’s attention to detail. It’s said that “the devil is in the detail" and, in his book, Gould… show more.

A brilliant evolutionary paleontologist, Gould was one of science’s great disruptors, frequently calling on his peers to rethink old thoughts. He was also one of America’s great popularizers of natural history. When first published, this book was described as ‘a masterpiece of analysis and imagination’ and its author ‘the finest scientific essayist writing today’. In Wonderful Life, Gould explores the discovery and interpretation of those strange animals that inhabited Earth when complex life first evolved. He also uses the book to develop his own controversial thesis about the development of life. The book remains a great work of non-fiction.… show more.

Stephen Jay Gould’s book frames the history of life within the context of earth’s history. It focuses on the fauna of the Burgess Shale that Charles Doolittle Walcott discovered in 1909 at a small quarry on a steep mountainside in the Canadian Rockies. Gould’s book brings to life the Cambrian Explosion, when multicellular life suddenly, in geologic time, introduced all the phyla that exist today, including chordata, our own phyla and demonstrates to readers that “the beauty of nature lies in its details.”

Steve was one of the greatest science communicators. He writes beautifully and passionately. The breadth and depth of his knowledge and understanding, particularly in matters relating to topics such as Evolution, Life, The History of Science & Ideas was extraordinary; and the way that he could link such serious and esoteric topics with matters in everyday life is engaging and uplifting of the spirit. This story about the pioneering work done by scientists trying to unravel the mystery of the origin and evolution of complex life on this planet interweaves endeavour, chance, and determination, mixed with an overarching insight into… show more.

This book has special resonance for me as a geoscientist, because it relates to events from deep in geological history, more than half a billion years ago. It is also a quintessential story of scientific discovery. Gould, in his inimitable style, writes about a unique assemblage of fossils in a rock formation in British Columbia called the Burgess Shale, and how these fossils transformed ideas about the evolution of life on earth. The anatomically bizarre and truly wonderful fossils are part of what is known as the Cambrian explosion, the sudden appearance in the fossil record of wholly new and… show more.