UBC: Gould, Wonderful Life

[truepenny]

Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History by Stephen Jay Gould

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



I'm not saying anything startling or new when I say this book is awesome.

So, for one thing, it's a book about writing and about mythology, and how what we think we know limits what we see and therefore what stories we can tell, a problem which Gould addresses both in terms of paleontologists looking at the Burgess Shale and in terms of Gould himself looking at the paleontologists looking at the Burgess Shale. So he talks about how Charles Doolittle Walcott got everything wrong (except for the names--surely some subconscious tingle was telling him these little animals were weirder than he thought they were) because he saw what he expected to see when he looked at them. And then Gould talks about himself looking at Drs. Whittington and Conway Morris and thinking he knew what he was looking at; surely when you have a conservative paleontologist ("conservative" in its proper dictionary meaning, not its political meaning) and his young, radical, fire-breathing graduate student, the two must butt heads.

But they don't.

Gould is perfectly transparent about the tangle he gets himself in because he lets his mythology do his thinking for him. So he's talking about how the stories we tell create mythology (like the myth of the discovery of the Burgess Shale, which in point of fact happened in an utterly undramatic field-science kind of way) and then how, in turn, that mythology once created limits the stories we can tell. The paleontologist and his graduate student collaborate with the other graduate student (who gets left out of the picture in the mythology precisely because he doesn't fit the false binary) to completely re-form our understanding of the evolution of multicellular life on Earth. The animals of the Burgess Shale are mostly not proto-crustaceans as Walcott labeled them. Some of them aren't arthropods at all.

This book is also awesome for two other reasons:

(1) Gould's enthusiasm (which I admit I found both endearing and infectious) for explaining the creatures of the Burgess Shale to his lay audience. And his passionate commitment to the notion of an intelligent lay audience that he can explain them to.

(2) the creatures themselves which are holy shit not even kidding the most unheimlich things I have ever seen, including tarantulas, which used to be my #1. (I like spiders, but there's something about tarantulas, the way they move, or the way they look like they ought to be inanimate but aren't . . .) I kept having to remind myself that Opabinia is (a) two inches long and (b) extinct, and even then it didn't really help with the way my spine kept trying to crawl up into my skull to hide.

But the animals of the Burgess Shale are weird and amazing and beautiful in their own way, and their principles of design are far more imaginative than anything I've ever read or seen in science fiction . . . except maybe "Or All the Seas with Oysters."

Maybe.



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Comments

[herewiss13.livejournal.com]

It has been some time since I've read the book so I may have a detail wrong, but , ironically, I believe the consensus now is that the Burgess fauna are (mostly) now connected to established taxa, rather than early "lost experiments."  Hallucigenia, for example, is related to velvet worms.  All the arguments about historical contigency still hold much weight, though.

*sigh* If only Gould were still around for a new edition (among other endeavors) :-(

[harvestar.livejournal.com]

My husband has long been enamoured of the creatures of the Burgess Shale. So much so that I've crocheted a Hallucugenia for him and just bought him a large stuffed Opabinia for Christmas (yay, etsy).