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remocpi's review against another edition
5.0
Nos habla el autor de la suerte como factor evolutivo, lo que es indudable. Nosotros no estaríamos aquí si no fuera por un meteorito. Pero estas extinciones de animales que dominaban la Tierra han pasado más veces, y no son atribuibles solo a la presión evolutiva. Pasan más cosas (muchas de las cuales no podemos conocer solo por el registro fósil), se juntan varias coincidencias, y lo que parecía un statu quo cambia.
Dicen los que saben que en los más de 30 años que han pasado desde la publicación del libro, la cladística (estudio de relaciones entre especies basándose en sus similitudes evolutivas) y la filogenia (estudio de parentescos entre especies) descritas por el autor para las especies del Cámbrico han sido superadas, cosa que simultáneamente a) es de esperar, es lo que esperamos de la Ciencia y b) no le quita el sentido de la maravilla y las intenciones iniciales al libro, que es por lo que nos lo leemos.
El estilo de Gould es maravilloso siempre excepto cuando te tiene que dar información concreta, que entonces es demasiado lírico para los datos; y el autor no sabe cambiar de registro. Por lo demás es un auténtico placer leerlo, siempre.
sophielegarrec's review against another edition
5.0
eric_robert_campbell's review against another edition
4.5
sdsouza's review against another edition
4.0
In the movie It's A Wonderful Life, George Bailey tells Uncle Billy that the three most exciting sounds are of anchor chains, plane motors, and train whistles. To me, one is that of a page being turned. Books transport you into periods and worlds that you can never hope to visit, most existing in either the past or the heads of their authors.
Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould focuses on two periods. One spans roughly 70 years since 1909 when C D Walcott discovered the Burgess Shale fossils in the Canadian Rockies. Walcott, in Gould's memorable words, shoe-horned every last Burgess animal into a modern group, viewing the fauna collection as a set of primitive or ancestral versions of later, improved forms. The view remained largely unchallenged until the 1970s and '80s, during which time H B Whittington, D Briggs, and S C Morris published painstakingly researched papers that significantly revised the fossil groupings. Some fossils have still not found a place in known existing or extinct groups.
The other period is the Middle Cambrian epoch on the geological timescale. The Cambrian period is well known for the Cambrian Explosion, the relatively accelerated evolution of more complex forms of life over a timeline of just 10-80 million years. The Burgess Shale fossils date from around 505 million years ago, placing them squarely in the Middle Cambrian epoch and just after the Explosion. The value of the Walcott discovery is the astonishing range of fossils found in the shale, and their near complete preservation. In an ecological study of the find described by Gould, Morris cites the following statistics
- 73300 specimens collected
- Nearly 88% animals
- 86% soft bodied, 14% with shells
- 119 genera in 140 species
Gould uses the two events to illustrate some of his controversial ideas. He argues that an important lesson from Burgess Shale is that chance plays a major role in evolution. In his own words, current patterns were not slowly evolved by continuous proliferation and advance, but set by a pronounced decimation (after a rapid initial diversification of anatomical designs), probably accomplished with a strong, perhaps controlling, component of lottery. Richard Dawkins, in a review of the book, praises the form (and some content - he says Gould makes worm anatomy descriptions unputdownable) but tears into the themes that Gould weaves - that much larger diversity prevailed in "Burgess Shale times" than exists today, that this contradicts current thinking and that evolutionists should be shocked by Gould's conclusion.
The book, as Dawkins found, is captivating. The story of the fossil discovery, its misinterpretation and the subsequent research that corrected it all read as close as one can get to a paleontological thriller. Gould is often eloquent, and always interesting, even as he goes into the anatomical details of the curious creatures -
A five eyed, long proboscis-bearing, 3-4 inch creature called Opabinia regalis that evoked general hilarity when Whittington first showed it to the Paleontological Association of Oxford;
Anomalocaris canadensis named before Walcott discovered parts of it in Burgess Shale (the name didn't prevent Walcott mistaking the different parts as either entire animals in themselves or parts of other animals);
Hallucigenia sparsa, a bizarre creature with seven pairs of stilts on one side of the trunk and seven tentacles on the other (portrayed in the book according to prevailing convention as walking on the stilts, while newer finds in China indicate that there might be a second set of tentacles with claws which are the legs. The stilts are on top acting as defence mechanisms!).
The Smithsonian has a gallery of specimens from the Burgess Shale.
It has been a long while since I got into this much biological detail, and Gould doesn't shy away from technical descriptions. I am glad I stuck with it though, and recommend the book to anyone who wants to know what kind of shenanigans life was up to 500 million years ago. Needless to say, the Darwin Wars are just one illustration of what shenanigans life is up to now. Long may we shenanigate.
Gould named the book after the movie, to emphasize how chance and contingency influence evolution.
srsmn's review
5.0
SJG does a great job spinning the scientific reevaluation of the burgess fossils into an entertaining story and bearing with him through all the emphasis on arthropod anatomy will pay off. i find it funny that the people who criticise gould's popular works fall into two opposite camps, those who think his writing is too dry for the layman and those who are offended at the thought of a scientist talking about science as social activity. maybe he could have just written a nice book about stamps instead?
ericwelch's review
4.0
In the late 60s Harry Whittington began to study the Burgess fossils in detail and discovered that many of them beloned to lineages which left no modern descendants. The identification of Marrella, Opabinia and other strange Cambrian creatures dropped. a real bombshell in paleontological circles. They prove that the Cambrian was a time of incredible evolutionary experimentation. In the space of a few tens of millions of years there evolved not only the ancestors of everything alive today, but also dozens of lineages that never went anywhere. Most of them were simply wiped out during mass extinction episodes: that of the Permo-Triassic resulted in the extinction of 96% of the species then alive.
Stephen Jay Gould has chronicled the story of the Burgess shale in detail. But in true Gould fashion he has drawn broader lessons. He looks at the career of Walcott and examines why Walcott felt it was necessary to shoehorn all of the Burgess forms into a progressive theory of ancestry and diversification. Historians (and paleontologists are a subspecies of historian) like all people are often deeply constrained by what they expect to find. The Burgess shale did not fit previous theory and was therefore made to fit. The implication of Whittington's discoveries is that evolution depends upon an enormous number of accidents, each so contingent upon the other that it would be impossible to replay the tape and get the same story again.
Gould ends his book with an extended meditation on the nature of historical truth. He rejects the idea that the historical sciences are in principle less accurate than the experimental sciences: they are both capable of arriving at the truth, often through the progressive detection and correction of error
halfmanhalfbook's review
2.0
Gould writes about the people who spent hour after painstaking hour examining the samples, deciphering the forms and understanding the compressed fossils in this rock formation. In the second part of the book he writes about Walcott, administrator at the Smithsonian institute until he died, and his error in the analysis in the samples. He then considers the what if questions that evolution throws up, in the final part.
I found the writing style to be quite dry and technical. Understandable to a certain extent given the subject matter, but my feeling is with science writers is that they should make the subject that they are writing about come alive, and this book didn't do it for me. The part on Walcott was good, he was a man who had a lot of influence and authority in the scientific advances in America, but he suffered some fundamental flaws.
This was written 20 or so years ago now, and in its time would have been a seminal work; now it is still important, but understanding of the creatures in the Burgess shale are now better understood and technology can bring them to life in ways that Gould could have never of considered.
terriaminute's review against another edition
3.0
That said, I appreciated the take on what the Cambrian Explosion meant for evolution generally, and the further musings on what it meant for humans specifically, much much later.
If you want to read this, know the text is 85%, the rest appendices. Since I skimmed so much, I'm glad I could borrow the ebook via my library. :)
halfmanhalfbook's review against another edition
2.0
Gould writes about the people who spent hour after painstaking hour examining the samples, deciphering the forms and understanding the compressed fossils in this rock formation. In the second part of the book he writes about Walcott, administrator at the Smithsonian institute until he died, and his error in the analysis in the samples. He then considers the what if questions that evolution throws up, in the final part.
I found the writing style to be quite dry and technical. Understandable to a certain extent given the subject matter, but my feeling is with science writers is that they should make the subject that they are writing about come alive, and this book didn't do it for me. The part on Walcott was good, he was a man who had a lot of influence and authority in the scientific advances in America, but he suffered some fundamental flaws.
This was written 20 or so years ago now, and in its time would have been a seminal work; now it is still important, but understanding of the creatures in the Burgess shale are now better understood and technology can bring them to life in ways that Gould could have never of considered.