Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History

Written by Stephen Jay Gould

Narrated by Jonathan Sleep

"[An] extraordinary book . . . Mr. Gould is an exceptional combination of scientist and science writer . . . He is thus exceptionally well placed to tell these stories, and he tells them with fervor and intelligence."—James Gleick, New York Times Book Review



High in the Canadian Rockies is a small limestone quarry formed 530 million years ago called the Burgess Shale. It holds the remains of an ancient sea where dozens of strange creatures lived—a forgotten corner of evolution preserved in awesome detail. In this book, Stephen Jay Gould explores what the Burgess Shale tells us about evolution and the nature of history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Apr 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9798765090725

Reviews for Wonderful Life

[El lector utópico · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Enormous is the disappointment I have experienced while reading The Wonderful Life. I have longed for the magic of popular science books that envelop the entire formation of life, its emergence, its consolidation, its stabilization, its evolution with their aura. This language, in my view excessively empirical, filled with scientific rigor, has allowed the entire magical halo to dissipate. This does not detract in the slightest from those who seek to navigate among its pages through a plethora of knowledge, through scientific descriptions of the beginnings of life on our battered planet. To dive into the currents of biology up to the configuration of life as we know it today, through its evolutionary stages. But I have missed all of that. (Translated from Spanish)

[pdcread · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This is a book primarily about the abundance of life in that had been preserved in fossils in the Burgess shale.

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.

[ritaer_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Immensely detailed story of the re-evaluation of the invertebrate pre-Cambrian fossils of the Burgess Shale. Originally assumed to be precursors of modern phyla they were eventually recognized as previously unknown groups that did not survive. The author sees this and other instances of evolutionary bottlenecks as evidence of the randomness of evolution. Originally published in 1989 it is still an excellent example of the methods of science and the ways in which preconceptions can affect recognition of evidence.

[sf_addict · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Excellent treatise on early prehistoric life.

[ecw0647 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Burgess Shale is a fossil deposit of importance equal to that of the Rift Valley sites of East Africa in that it provides truly pivotal evidence for the story of' life on earth. The shale comes from a small quarry in the Canadian Rockies discovered in the early 20th century by Charles Walcott, then a leading figure at the Smithsonian. The Burgess fossils come from the Middle Cambrian Period, around 350 million years ago. They form one of the earliest assemblages of soft-bodied creatures from the first era 1'0 multicelled animals. They include various worms, crustaceans, etc., but also a large number of unique and unclassifiable forms.

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

[judithskiss · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

After reading some Gould on my travels, I came back to the U.S. in search of more of his writings. I found this in a used books store. I hadn't given much concern to paleontology until I read this. Wonderful Life uses the evolutionary biology of marine invertebrates as a template for analyzing and questioning some of our most important concepts of evolution.
In this book, Gould expresses the conundrum that contingency is responsible. His writing encourages one to meditate on all known scientific conclusions but then open one's mind to the possibility of unimagined conclusions.

[dirtpriest_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Several of the reviews of this book are critical of it and I can't figure out why. Now, Gould makes some far reaching conclusions, or better yet, possibilities, based on fossils from a single shale bed on a lonely mountain in British Colombia. The deal is, the Burgess Shale is one of a very few fossil beds that preserve soft-bodied creatures, anywhere in the world. (Another is the Mazon Creek formation, a about sixty miles from Chicago.) The other thing is that these fossils are from the Cambrian Period, the first named span of time that is based on fossil remnants. All rock layers below and before the Cambrian have no visible fossils, Cambrian and later rocks do (or can.) There are fossil remains in older rocks but nothing obviously from multicellular life. In fact, the sudden appearance of blatantly obvious fossils is referred to as the Cambrian explosion, so suddenly do they appear, relatively speaking.

Now, the trick is that, almost universally, only hard shells, bones and teeth are preserved. In the Burgess shale, soft creatures from the very dawn of multi-cellular organisms are preserved in great detail. (Fossils are only as detailed as the surrounding rock allow them to be and shale is very finely grained. Sandstone only preserves details bigger than the sand grains it is made of.) The interpretation of the shale itself is that it is formed from a mudslide that dragged all of the little bugs and worms down into the depths with it. This is called a turbidite and is based on the specific way the different sized grains sort themselves as the mud settles. Through fortunate happenstance this shale bed is exposed for study.

The interesting thing about the Burgess fauna is that there are around twenty different types of arthropods (insects, crabs, trilobites, spiderey things, etc.) that have no counterpart today, and are only known from this one isolated fossil bed. These are theoretically regarded as completely new and unique phyla with no relatives today. Gould's hypothesis challenges the traditional view of evolutionary progress. Not the mechanics of change over time, but the origins of different phyla and classes. He proposes that a wide range of basic plans were able to try their hand at populating an empty ecosystem and that the phyla we have today are the few survivors of this original Cambrian explosion. He refers to the commonly taught 'cone of diversity', one point branching out and up, as probably being off base. Strictly based on this fortunate preservation and a few others, he proposes a concept of decimation, where one point branches out into many parallel branches, some of which survive and thrive but most don't. There are no five eyed arthropods around today, for example, but there is one in the Burgess record. I know, I know, this is a big jump based on such a small sample, but when that small sample is completely contrary to common theory, then that theory needs a good tweaking. Obviously, any topic of evolution is stirring the pot of controversy in the first place.

Gould goes into great detail as he is an evolutionary biologist and high ranking paleontologist. Also in Wonderful Life, Gould discusses the people involved in deciphering the Burgess fossils, including Charles Walcott, the discoverer and apparently a forgotten titan of American Science. All in all, I have to rank this as one of the best science books that I have read, right up there with Sagan's Dragons of Eden and Gleik's Chaos: Making a New Science.

[devil_llama · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Gould's discussion of the wonderulf Burgess Shale, a veritable treasure trove of fossils that have given us a lot of information about the Cambrian explosion. A great read, even if you don't agree with all of his ideas about the shale.

[psiloiordinary_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Ok a few scene setting comments; I have read most things Dawkins has written and the book I read before this one was Dawkins versus Gould - I even did a quick review if you want to have a look for it.

This book is both far more and far less than I expected.

Far less in the sense that I had built up my expectations for the writing style and narrative quality which simply were not met. Of course these expectations were very high indeed and on reflection If I had simply picked up the book and read it cold, then I would be saying that this is well written, simple but not simplified, clear without seeming to skim and allows the author's contagious enthusiasm for his field to shine through.

Far less in the sense that this book really is about just one fossil bed and a small proportion of the fossils found there when the title might have lead you to expect a tour of life on earth.

Far more in that you do get a glimpse into the detailed workings of scientists in one tiny corner of the world and we realise just how this whole science thing hangs together.

Far more in that you see something of the personalities and human motivation behind some pretty distinctive characters and how they knuckle down to the facts and the evidence before them.

Far more in that whilst the general hype and indeed the book itself most the way through, labels this as a story of how one scientist's mistakes and his blind following of convention is overturned by three brilliant minds re-examining the evidence, that is not, in fact, what we are given at all. With apologies to other LT reviews who have read this very differently from me (ironic or what?) Gould explores more of the mind and personal history of Walcott (the guy who got it wrong) and concludes that he did not in fact spend very much time looking at these fossils as he was a very busy administrator, and a good one to boot.

Far more in that we can glimpse the life of a scientist 100 years ago, and the life of people everywhere at that time, when personal tragedies through family illness would make the kind of medical advances science has made since then, and which we seem to take for granted all too often, appear to the people of that time as truly magical.

Far more in that this one small fossil bed can give us clues which do start to give some hints that there are more patterns in the history of life than we at first thought.

Much is made of the dispute between Dawkins and Gould. A careful reading of the actual bones of both of their arguments, and not the rhetorical flourishes they employ, or their publishers copy for that matter, reveals an awful lot of agreement combined with some humbly offered thoughts on possible alternative/additional considerations in a complex field. Then again I haven't read the exchange of book reviews which apparently encapsulates the essence of the dispute - it is on my to do list.


Overall an excellent book for anyone interested in the topic. For anyone who thinks they are interested but has yet to read around evolution and natural history then I would not recommend it as a first introduction to the topic - get some wool on your back reading more general works first. Blind Watchmaker, Selfish Gene, Ancestor's Tale, that kind of thing.