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Updated: 14 Feb 2004 |
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ISBN 0-1985-0256-7
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This book is probably the most successful popular science book ever written about a paleontological subject. Though I think there are many better books, this is the one which has grabbed the popular imagination and, no doubt, the sales. Which is unfortunate, really, because in Wonderful Life, Gould passes off a great deal of conjecture – much of it subsequently thrown into (even greater) doubt by further discoveries and better analysis – as The Way It Is.
WL ostensibly describes the massive effort of re-examining and re-interpreting the Burgess Shale collections from Walcott’s Quarry and nearby. This tale of discovery, and of the wonderful fossils themselves, is the best part of the book, and it is very good indeed. Gould’s writing is always very strong and the narrative is riveting.
Unfortunately, the same platform is also bent to use as a forum for advancing some of Gould’s dodgier pet theories. Now the late Stephen Jay Gould is certainly not an intellect to be under-estimated, and nobody would deny that much of his thinking – which frequently challenged orthodoxy – prompted many a useful debate. Yet I feel that Gould was rather too often hell-bent upon iconoclasm for its own sake, and much of his otherwise excellent popular writing suffered for it.
WL is, perhaps, his greatest casualty.
Both author and book have attracted considerable criticism (Richard Dawkins describes WL as "beautifully written and deeply muddled"), not least from one of the central ‘characters,’ Simon Conway Morris, who laid into many of Gould’s ideas in his own book, The Crucible of Creation. In WL, Gould’s central theme is his ‘bush of life’ analogy. Here, Gould takes a self-evident proposition – that Cambrian animals were a diverse and unfamiliar lot – and over-blows it into yet another one of his grandiose ‘pattern of nature’ theories. And, of course, only our Stephen has been clever enough to have realised the real significance of the work Whittington, Conway Morris and Briggs have been slaving over for years. Not only that, he makes his pitch direct to the public in a popular book, calling to mind the similar endeavours of Robert Bakker. Yick.
He sets about laying out flannel right from the outset. One example he chooses is the evolution of horses, about which he notes:
"To be sure, an unbroken evolutionary connection does link Hyracotherium ... to modern Equus. And, yes again, modern horses are bigger, with fewer toes and higher crowned teeth. But Hyracotherium—Equus is not a ladder, or even a central lineage. This sequence is but one labyrinthine pathway among thousands on a complex bush." — p. 36
And your point, Stephen? Gould implies that the rest of the world, who are clearly not as clever as he is, are confused by this "labyrinth" and perceive the evolution of horses as the simple, unidirectional modification of a few characteristics in a "progression" from one single species to another. On the contrary, I would contend that the rest of us are every bit as clever as Dr. Gould, and that the "ladder" only ever existed in his own mind. Were he still alive, I’d direct his attention to my favourite childhood paleontology book, the inspirational though now sadly dated Time, Life and Man, written in 1959 by R. A. Stirton; specifically to p. 466 where the horse lineage is depicted graphically - not as a simple-minded ladder, but in all of its glorious diversity. I guess this is one of the things that piss me off so much about Gould: he spent his life shooting down bad ideas that nobody, except himself, ever held.
There is much that offends me in WL, not least the sanctimonious self-promotion which invests (I nearly said infests) every page. For the purposes of the following brief discussion, I'll tackle just three.
We’ve already alluded to the iconography issue. Gould explains to the reader that other evolutionists’ views of the subject are clouded by a conceptual model that represents evolutionary relationships between living things variously as a continuously branching tree (a "cone of increasing diversity" where diversity of the lineage always increases) or a ladder. His point is that, during certain times, diversity might sometimes decrease, but that we have been blind to that possibility.
Fig. 1: A simple cladogram.
But in fact, as Gould knew full well, though his readers may not, evolutionary trees (called phylogenies) are actually represented by cladograms (sometimes known as dendrograms), a very simple example of which is reproduced to the right. The only "iconography" contained here is a belief in descent with modification from common ancestry - in short: evolution. Although the criteria selected to deduce which is most closely related to which may be chosen and weighted subjectively, there is no hidden agenda in the final shape; there is no clouded thinking.
The bulk of WL is about animals that, today, are considered to be arthropods, plain and simple. Even the famous Hallucigenia appears fairly conventional when stood on his feet (WL depicts him upside-down) and placed alongside Microdictyon et al.
But let us consider the arthropods in perspective. As early as the late 1970s, work by Carl Woese and George Fox had revealed that our old ideas about the diversity of life were quite incomplete. By studying ribosomal RNA common to all life, Woese and Fox were able to show that the living world was profoundly divided into three vast "super-kingdoms" now named the Bacteria, Archaea and Eukarya. It is the last of these which contains the plants and animals with which we have daily familiarity, but not as the major constituents. Among the Microsporidia, Ciliates, slime moulds and fungi, the animal kingdom is but one small branch, and the arthropod clade - great as it is - but one twig on the end of that. Pretty small fry from which to be extrapolating to the whole of nature.
In writing about the Cambrian explosion, Gould makes a great fuss of something that began about 530 million years ago and lasted for maybe 10 or 20 million years. (These ages are different from those given in WL; at the time Gould wrote, there were far fewer good radiometric dates available than is the case today, and also the Cambrian was generally considered to have begun with rocks correlating with a unit called the Tommotian. These errors are not Gould’s fault: any book written around 1989 would contain the same errors.) If he doesn’t outright say so, he certainly implies that the majority of diversity in the living world arose during this time. Yet we have already seen that the most fundamental differences - the deepest splits in the tree of life - are those between the super-kingdoms which arose at least 1,200 million years ago.
The real diversity of life was established more than twice as long ago as the Cambrian explosion, a fact which Gould finesses.
Gould also rather conveniently down-plays the insects, which comprise approximately three quarters of all animals. Given the central role arthropods play in the WL story, you’d expect a more honourable mention. I suppose it is because insects first appear in the Devonian or latest Silurian, a hundred million years too late to support his theory, that Gould finesses them, too.
Many of Gould’s ideas were - if not completely justifiable - at least more understandable in 1989, when WL was written. Interestingly, though, Gould never publicly modified his views in the face of new evidence. For example, although (in Eight Little Piggies) he does appear to allow that Hallucigenia was a conventional onychophoran, he offers no comment on the weakening of his ‘bush of life’ analogy. (Read more.)
Recommendation: Recommended, though only with "parental guidance" – by which I mean that you have to know which is useful stuff and which is simply Gould sounding off.
Look and Feel: Paperback; indifferent quality paper with some excellent figures (some not so good, too) but hopelessly poor reproduction of the b&w photographs. Avoid the English printing of the Penguin version of this book at all costs! The book includes a decent (though now sadly dated, and I suspect selective, even in its day) bibliography, and a good index. Definitely not a text book.
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