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57 of 64 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
By turns engrossing and mildly annoying, October 23, 1999
This review is from: The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals (Hardcover)
This book begins with a rather difficult glossary, then goes on to confront the reader with sentences that have opening clauses such as "Embedded in Spenglerian cyclicity..." The book does lighten up after a while (or perhaps the reader simply becomes accustomed to the style), but at the very least it seems fair to say that Morris doesn't underestimate the intellect of his readers. He has written an interesting book about the Burgess Shale that reviews familiar facts and adds some illuminating new material.
Morris's prose does get out of hand from time to time, making dark hints or arch asides with no explication, leaving the reader thinking "and exactly what would THAT be?" (A case in point is his footnote reference to "the poisonous ideas of such individuals as Derrida." Huh? Deconstructionism is relevant to paleobiology? Spare me an explanation of THAT.)
Still, most of the book is coherent and informative - particularly if you give up on reading the footnotes and stick with the main text.
The book does annoy in its relentless disparaging of Steven J. Gould, not because Morris dares to disagree with the role of punctuated equilibrium and (more importantly) contingency, but because of his condescending and not altogether consistent dismissal of the larger implications that flow from Gould's ideas. In the first chapter, Morris tells us that Gould's "arid manifesto" is "unequivocal. The likelihood of Man evolving on any other planet is extraordinarily unlikely." This is a philosophical criticism because Morris doesn't like what he thinks Gould implies by this. Since Morris never plainly explains, it is hard to be sure, but evidently he feels that Gould's view says that the human race has no larger meaning and needn't take any responsibility for things because we're just a chance, and highly unlikely, event.
Personally, I never took that message from anything written by Gould (he's one of the most engagingly literate humanists I read) but Morris certainly has the credentials to form a knowledgeable opinion otherwise. What annoys is that Morris closes his book with a somewhat intellectually messy essay noting that it is at least statistically possible that humans are unique and therefore we have a special responsibility to our planet. Let me get this straight: if GOULD says humanity is a unique, wondrous event, then Gould is the proponent of some evil, nihilistic philosophy. But if MORRIS says we're unique, it is cause for celebration, humility, and stewardship. Oh well - at least Morris compels you to think, even if you wish his own thoughts were a bit clearer.
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31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Superb study on the Burgess Shale, September 1, 2002
Morris, one of two contemporary specialists on the Burgess Shale, has produced an exceedingly well-written survey of the Burgess shale fauna and their meaning for evolutionary biology. The book is loaded with scores of B/W photos, 4 color drawings, a 13-page glossary of terms for the uninitiated, an imaginative underwater excursis with time-travelling paleontologists to the middle Cambrian, and a chapter on developmental evolutionary genetics (wherein he argues that many Burgess forms *are* related to contemporary forms). Stephen Jay Gould's view of the significance of the Burgess Shale is that the bizarre life-forms seen then demonstrate the historical contingency of evolution--rewind the tape and let it play out again, and things would turn out differently (a la Jimmy Stewart's "Wonderful Life"). Morris's thesis is that Gould's tape-player metaphor is misleading, overemphasizing contingency at the cost of ignoring the powerful role played by ecology . One need only consider the evolution of convergent traits in insular life-forms (e.g., Australian marsupial cat-like predators) to get the point. (I should point out that I am suspicious of monolithic theories from either pole of the necessity-chance spectrum.) I find it unfortunate that Gould never discussed Bradley Efron's Bootstrap, a technique used widely in evolutionary and population genetics, or cellular automata, a la Stuart Kauffman, which give rise to the same recurrent patterns with astonishing regularity.) Morris is an adaptationist senstive to the power of ecology to shape evolution, who sees Burgess forms not as deviant freaks that accidentally went extinct but as ancestral to contemporary animals. As usual, there is likely to be truth to both positions; indeed, in some ways, their different views turn on different understandings of probability. For anyone with more than a passing interest in evolutionary biology and paleontology, who finds Gould's incessant digressions distracting, or wonders about the hypertrophy of contingency, this book should not be missed.
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36 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
interesting but misses the point, October 31, 2001
By A Customer
In a very interesting book, on a fascinating and inspiring topic, one of the key figures is making his ideas public, and does not convince. Simon Conway Morris tries to undermine or oppose the views of S.J. Gould, and while he might scientifically be the most likely person to succeed in such a feat, he utterly fails to do so. Conway Morris is very hostile to the views presented in Gould's "wonderful life", which were largely based upon his OWN earlier view, and does little justice to the man who brought him under the public (although by no means scientific, a task in which he succeeded extremely well on his own merit) spotlights. Conway Morris's arguments are based upon 3 major arguments: that of convergence, that of cladistics, and that of disparity. The first one is undoubtedly true, but trivial. Convergence can and will occur, but as it can be brought up by taxa belonging to extant groups, it has no bearing on the shape of the tree of life. Gould made no claim that ecological niches will not be filled - just that they will be filled later in evolution by more closely related taxa. The second argument is irrelevant and misleading. Again, Gould does not claim all the Burgess shale's weird wonders arose separately - quite on the contrary, but he does claim they arose early on the tree of life. Every life form can be fitted on a dendrogram, so the fact you can put Opabinia and Sidenyia on the same tree, is irrelevant to the argument presented. So we are basically left with the third argument. Throughout the book Conway Morris is claiming to have refuted the arguments of "Wonderful life", and as his own arguments are weak you are constantly waiting for him to pull the smoking gun. This appears not before about 15 pages from the end, and one is startled to see all of Conway Morris's argument relies on just one study - Foote's 1990 study of disparity in Burgess-shale and later trilobites. The conclusions arising from this analysis are in no way the clear cut evidence Conway Morris wants them to be: the debate is on between scientists as to their validity and implications, and more importantly - they do not even directly bear on the question of disparity between HIGHER taxonomic units (e.g. Phyla): the major issue at hand. Thus Conway Morris's book fails to convince. It does however a fascinating story, and the most updated one today, of the wonderful story about animal origins. Conway Morris is modest in his claims to knowledge, and fully acknowledges what he don't know, or not sure of (this goes to facts, not arguments) and noble in his efforts to relate his story to recent conservation issues. All in all I'd read his book for the most updated info on the animals, and "Wonderful life" for the best philosophy of science
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