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23 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Even Gould Can Be Wrong, July 20, 2001
I gave this book 3 stars because it is well written, if a bit ornate; the reader is really left with a sense of awe and wonder at the wonderfulness of Life. At least I know I was.I didn't give it more than 3 stars because, scientifically speaking, it stinks. It is by far Goulds worst book. I would recommend people to read this book, but when you do, try to remember that the taxonomic rank of phylum, contrary to what Gould claims, lacks a definition; that a 'fundamental body plan' is a wholly arbitrary after-the-fact construction; that neither the rank of phylum or 'fundamental body plans' has any whatsoever evolutionary significance; and that no-one knows why or how the animals of Burgess Shale went extinct. But on to the book. It is, on the surface, about some remarkable fossils found at a place called Burgess Shale. Gould spends a substantial part of the book expounding how the psychosocial background of the original discoverer, C. Walcott, led him ("preconditioned" is the word Gould uses) to Get It All Wrong when he classified ("shoehorned") the fossils in known phyla, whereas the zeitgeist of the late 20th century allows a group of whacky new researchers to Get It All Right and see that they belong to previously unknown phyla. One is then treated to a nice exposé of some really interesting fossils, and there's not much to say about them except that most have since the book was published been re-evaluated, and are today classified as velvet worms, arthropods or annelids (still as interesting, but less enigmatic - and ironically much like Walcott first "shoehorned" them). Why, Gould asks, did essentially all modern phyla arise in a short period in the cambrian, as well as, allegedly, a large number of phyla which today are extinct, when no new phyla have arisen in the subsequent 550 million years? And the extinct phyla, they seem complex and 'seaworthy' enough - surely which phylum lived and which went extinct must have been purely decided by chance? Surely, if we re-played evolution, the world today would be very different? There are two errors in that line of reasoning. Firstly the most pervasive: the reification of the taxonomic rank of Phylum and of the concept of 'body plan'. Gould in this book equals the taxonomic rank of Phylum to the concept of 'fundamental body plan': one body plan = one phylum. This is a bit backwards - the rank of phylum is arbitrary and lacks a definition, but is historically (but not always) afforded the most inclusive groups of animals between which interrelationship is unclear. The concept of 'bauplan' or 'fundamental body plan'is similarly wholly arbitrary - a body plan is a collection of traits deemed characteristic for the group, and can be created for any group, regardless of inclusivity: you take a group of species, such as a phylum, determine what is characteristic for the group, and voilá, there's the fundamental body plan. What does this mean? That neither the rank of phylum nor the concept of 'bauplan'/'fundamental body plan' has any evolutionary significance - and yet this is what Gould bases his argumentation on in this book. The second error is a logical one, and is that _even if_ Opabinia, Anomalocaris and the others had represented "new" phyla, and _even if_ phylum had been the same as "fundamental body plan", and _even if_ that had meant something from an evolutionary point of view, this isn't support for Goulds view that evolution is stochastic, driven by chance extinctions rather than adaptation. All we know is that Burgess Shale organisms went extinct - we do not know why. For all we know these organisms were outcompeted, and would be outcompeted again and again if we 're-played' the history of Earth. The support Gould thinks they give his pet theory isn't there. So, to sum things up - in this book Gould uses psychosocial arguments to dismiss the science of Walcott and support that of Simon Conway Morris; misunderstands what a phylum is; misunderstands what a "fundamental body plan" is; bases his reasoning on misidentified fossils; and draws conclusions which aren't supported by the supplied evidence. But he does it in a really enthusing way. There's no denying it's a good read. Simon Conway Morris, the chief "hero" in this book, has since done his best to distance himself from Gould - to the point that he tends to deem it necessary to explain what a phylum is in his articles, and has written the Gould-critical book "Crucibles of creation" (which isn't that great either).
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by Stephen Jay Gould
by Stephen Jay Gould
by Stephen Jay Gould
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