![]() “Perhaps,” he wrote frostily, “we are only an afterthought, a kind of cosmic accident, just one bauble on the Christmas tree of evolution. Far from being the pinnacle of evolution, we are just another product of contingency. Gould also had little time for humanity’s hubris. We tell ourselves stories of evolutionary progress but these are just wishful thinking Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History Stephen Jay Gould 4.14 9,643 ratings314 reviews High in the Canadian Rockies is a small limestone quarry formed 530 million years ago called the Burgess Shale. As Gould wrote in his classic book Wonderful Life: “Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress”. The few that survive we call the most advanced, but that is a profound error which conflates “latest” with “best”. ![]() Life produces abundant variations most fail. ![]() We tell ourselves stories of evolutionary progress but these are just wishful thinking. Droughts, ice ages and meteorites strike without warning and kill off fully fit individuals and species. Sexual reproduction combines genes at random. His point was to demonstrate that evolution is not a process of inexorable progress but of contingency. The world would be unfamiliar, and would probably lack humans. ![]() ![]() If it were possible to turn the clock back half a billion years and then let evolution happen all over again, what would we see? Gould famously argued that the history of life would not repeat itself. CELEBRATED palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould once wondered what would happen if we could rewind the tape of life. ![]()
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