Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (1989) is a book on the evolution of Cambrian fauna by Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. The volume was the 1991 winner of The Aventis Prizes for Science Books, and a 1991 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Gould's thesis in Wonderful Life was that chance was one of the decisive factors in the evolution of life on earth. He based this argument on the wonderfully preserved fossil fa...
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Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (1989) is a book on the evolution of Cambrian fauna by Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. The volume was the 1991 winner of The Aventis Prizes for Science Books, and a 1991 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Gould's thesis in Wonderful Life was that chance was one of the decisive factors in the evolution of life on earth. He based this argument on the wonderfully preserved fossil fauna of the Burgess Shale, animals from around 530 million years ago, just after the Cambrian explosion. Gould argued that although the Burgess animals were all exquisitely adapted to their environment, most of them left no modern descendants and, more importantly, that the surviving creatures did not seem better adapted than their now extinct contemporaneous neighbors. He proposed that given a chance to "rewind the universe" and flip the coin of natural selection again, we might find ourselves living in a world populated by descendants of...
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