Wonderful Life

"When I was approaching my life as a mature scientist, Stephen Jay Gould was the prime force in palaeontology. He was regarded almost as a demi-god. He’s written a number of good books. He writes extremely well, but the book that touched me most was this one, which actually became an international bestseller. Wonderful Life is about the Burgess Shale, which is a deposit of the Cambrian age. The Cambrian is a division of geological time – the first major division bearing numerous fossils of animals we can easily recognise. The base of the Cambrian is now 542 million years old and it lasted for 50 million years or so, and this is when abundant marine life as we know it really got going. That is the first appearance as fossils of many of the ancestors of living things. The animals I worked on, trilobites, appeared during the Cambrian. The Burgess Shale had been discovered many years earlier in Canada, in the state of British Colombia, and it was known that it contained fossils of all sorts of soft-bodied organisms. Normally fossils are only of bones and shells – hard bits, if you like – but this deposit preserved soft remains. Worms and organisms of that kind were preserved as fossils, and they certainly included some extraordinary-looking animals. Wonderful Life gave an account of the groundbreaking research that was going on into these fossils in the 70s and 80s. Gould, who was always fond of making grand statements, claimed that he had reinterpreted the entire history of life through the Burgess Shale. He certainly made it very famous. Well, he thought that there was more diversity of life, what he called disparity, in the Cambrian than there is now. In other words, we all have the idea of the tree of life wrong. Normally you think of the tree of life as bushes and branches that get richer upwards, don’t you? Whereas, actually, he says, it’s more like a Christmas tree: thicker at the bottom. There were lots of hopeful monsters in the Cambrian, many of them very strange-looking animals that he describes as ‘weird wonders’, and he claimed there was more variety then than there is now. Well, they were hopeful in the sense that had one lived rather than another, then the history of life might have been different because other creatures would have evolved rather than the ones that did. Indeed, maybe we wouldn’t be here now: something else would be here instead. It was a very appealing idea and sold lots and lots of copies in 1989 and made Gould even more famous. No, basically. But what he did do was suggest a field of research that I have pursued with colleagues of mine for a number of years to test the idea. So he proposed a stimulating idea that lots of people have subsequently followed. He asserted it rather than demonstrating it, so what we showed after a lot of research work was that disparity was surprisingly wide in the Cambrian, but not greater than it is today. Quite a lot of research was generated in an attempt to prove or disprove Gould. It was a very important book for us, because palaeontologists, apart from those who work on dinosaurs, can be seen as people working on rather obscure things that have long been extinct, but this put us more on the front pages. It was arguably very good for palaeontology even if he wasn’t right about the interpretation."