Under The Microscope

WONDERFUL LIFE, The Burgess Shale And The Nature Of History, by Stephen Jay Gould; Penguin Books, 1989; 348 pages, $24.95

I have been waiting, somewhat impatiently, for this book. I heard Gould last year wax eloquent about the Burgess Shale. It sounded fascinating.

The Burgess Shale contains a plethora of weird and wonderful soft-bodied creatures from over 500 million years ago. They are representatives of the Cambrian explosion, a time when nature seemed to be rolling dice as to which body forms to use. The arthropods preserved here include the four main phyla in which millions of different species are grouped today. They also include another 20 to 30 that could form separate, distinct phyla of their own, none of which have survived.

Gould's central thesis is that the Burgess Shale shows us how precarious is our own place in history. Wind back the tape of life to the Cambrian, and you have thousands, nay millions, of possible futures before you. A world where animals never developed complex body forms, a world where the water-to-land transition was never made, a world where the dinosaurs reigned forever.

The animals of the Burgess Shale are stunning in their alien beauty and their implications. Gould's enthusiasm for the subject is infectious but, sadly, his writing is hard to follow as he delves into the more arcane aspects of comparative anatomy.

It is true that an appreciation of the significance of biramous design does illuminate the subject, but it does so fitfully because of the way in which Gould has tackled the story. Not until the final chapter does one get a sense of why Gould is so excited and what significance these ancient, flattened fossils have. Nonetheless, that last chapter is well worth waiting for, leaving you with a sense of profound humility and awe.

Vicki Hyde, NZSM