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| Wonderful Life | |
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| Author | Stephen Jay Gould |
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| Subject(s) | Evolutionary history of life, Burgess Shale |
| Publisher | W. W. Norton & Co. |
| Publication date | 1989 |
| Pages | 347 |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-393-02705-8 |
| Preceded by | An Urchin in the Storm |
| Followed by | Bully for Brontosaurus |
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. Wonderful Life was the 1991 winner of The Aventis Prizes for Science Books, and a 1991 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
In this book, Gould presents his thesis that chance was one of the decisive factors in the evolution of life on earth. His thesis is based on the wonderfully preserved fossil fauna of the Burgess Shale, animals from around 530 million years ago, just after the Cambrian explosion. Gould argues 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. Gould 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 Hallucigenia rather than Pikaia. This seems to indicate that fitness for existing conditions does not ensure long-term survival, especially when conditions change rapidly, and that the survival of many species depends more on chance events and features, which Gould terms exaptations, fortuitously beneficial under future conditions than on features best adapted under the present environment (see also extinction event).
Most of the book's conclusions were deemed controversial at publication and some of Gould's examples were soon shown to be incorrect.1 However, the ultimate theme of the book is still being debated among evolutionary thinkers today.
Full House (1996) was deemed a companion book to Wonderful Life by the author.
References
- ^ Briggs, D. E. G.; Fortey, R. A. (2005), "Wonderful strife: systematics, stem groups, and the phylogenetic signal of the Cambrian radiation", Paleobiology 31 (2 (Supplement)): 94–112, doi:, http://paleobiol.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/reprint/31/2_Suppl/94.pdf
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