Wonderful Life

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High in the Canadian Rockies is a small limestone quarry formed 530 million years ago called the Burgess Shale It hold the remains of an ancient sea where dozens of strange creatures lived a forgotten corner of evolution preserved in awesome detail In this book Stephen Jay Gould explores what the Burgess Shale tells us about evolution and the nature of history. New Download Kindle ePUB Wonderful Life Author Stephen Jay Gould – kino-fada.fr A book about wonder and a wonderful book The story of the Burgess Shale from its initial misinterpretation to its reassessment 50 years later is mind blowing This limestone outcropping, which sits at an altitude of 8,000 feet in the Canadian Rockies, near British Columbia, was at equatorial sea level 530 million years ago Its shale has revealed about 150 previously unknown arthropod genera and entirely new species with anatomies that would be unimaginable to us today had Charles Doolittle Wal A book about wonder and a wonderful book The story of the Burges...A decent, but certainly out of date book The most interesting section is that regarding the anatomy of the Burgess biota, and the historical narrative of Whittington, Conway Morris, and Briggs is also a highlight Thetechnical details of chapter three might throw some readers off, but I found them to be fascinating.Unfortunately, most of the book is out of date Most of the weird wonders that Gould describes have been taxonomically re evaluated in the previous two decades, and technical A decent, but certainly out of date book The most interesting section is that regarding the anatomy of the Burgess biota, and the historical narrative of Whittington, Conway Morris, and Briggs is also a highlight Thetechnical details of chapter three might throw some readers off, but I found them to be fascinating.Unfortunately, most of th...This book was unlike anything else I d ever read, I suspect because it owes something to the scientific monograph Maybe Not having ever read a scientific monograph they don t even call them that these days , I don t know Anyway, Gould repeated and repeated and repeated the same conclusions over and over and over and over, until I was ready to embrace the iconographies of the cone of increasing diversity and the ladder of progress ...The drama I have to tell is intense and intellectual It transcends these ephemeral themes of personality and the stock stage The victory at stake is bigger and farabstract than any material reward a new interpretation of life s history In these sentences Gould not only tells us the theme of his book but how much his work means to him His passion for paleontology and the story of life resonate from every page His tone, perspective and considerable writing skills make Wonderful Life The drama I have to tell is intense and intellectual It transcends these ephemeral themes of personality and the stock stage The victory at stake is bigger and farabstract than any material reward a new interpretation of life s history In these sentences Gould not only tells us the theme of his book but how much his work means to him His passion for paleontology and the story of life resonate from every page His tone, perspective and considerable writing skills make Wonderful Life a wonderful read.The Burgess Shale in the mountains of British Columbia is notable for its rich assortment of 500 million yea...Wonderful book.Some of the science has been overtaken in the quarter century since it was written, but mainly in the details, not in the main thrust of the arguments And it is very much a long argument, if mostly with someone other than me I could have stood to be a bit less tired and distracted when I chugged through it, but then, I don t have a quiz next period, so.If one were actually studying the creatures and evolutionary periods, I d think one would want somethingrecent, but all Wonderful book.Some of the science has been overtaken in the quarter century since it was written, but mainly in the details, not in the main thrust of the arguments And it is very much a long a...The Burgess Shale is a fossil deposit of importance equal to that of the Rift Valley sites of East Africa in that it provides truly pivotal evidence for the story of life on earth The shale comes from a small quarry in the Canadian Rockies discovered in the early 20th century by Charles Walcott, then a leading figure at the Smithsonian The Burgess fossils come from the Middle Cambrian Period, around 350 million years ago They form one of the earliest assemblages of soft bodied creatures from The Burgess Shale is a fossil deposit of importance equal to that of the Rift Valley sites of East Africa in that it provides truly pivotal evidence for the story of life on earth The shale comes from a small quarry in the Canadian Rockies discovered in the early 20th century by Charles Walcott, then a leading figure at the Smithsonian The Burgess fossils come from the Middle Cambrian Period, around 350 million years ago They form one of the earliest assemblages of soft bodied creatures from the first era 1 0 multicelled animals They include various worms, crustaceans, etc., but also a large number of unique and unclassifiable forms In the late 60s Harry Whittington began to study the Burgess fossils in detail and discovered that many of them beloned to lineages wh...I m not saying anything startling or new when I say this book is awesome.So, for one thing, it s a book about writing and about mythology, and how what we think we know limits what we see and therefore what stories we can tell, a problem which Gould addresses both in terms of paleontologists looking at the Burgess Shale and in terms of Gould himself looking at the paleontologists looking at the Burgess Shale So he talks about how Charles Doolittle Walcott got everything wrong except for the na I m not saying anything startling or new when I say this book is awesome.So, for one thing, it s a book about writing and about mythology, and how what we think we know limits what we see and therefore what stories we can tell, a problem which Gould addresses both in terms of paleontologists looking at the Burgess Shale and in terms of Gould himself looking at the paleontologists looking at the Burgess Shale So he talks about how Charles Doolittle Walcott got everything wrong except for the names surely some subconscious tingle was telling him these little animals were weirder than he thought they were because he saw what he expected to see when he looked at them And then Gould talks about himself looking at Drs Whittington and Conway Morris and thinking he knew what he was looking at surely when you have a conservative paleontologist c...Once upon a time, when I was on the path to being a geologist, I carved into the moist depths of a sandstone gorge in Clinton County, Iowa, and watched the sand crumble in my hand I jarred it, took it back to my lab, and sorted out the grains using a sequence of sieves of varying mesh, matched it to the known sedimentary facies from different depositional environments, and realized its origins A beach from the Silurian Period, still not entirely turned to rock.And that s when I knew that sedim Once upon a time, when I was on the path to being a geologist, I carved into the moist depths of a sandstone gorge in Clinton County, Iowa, and watched the sand crumble in my hand I jarred it, took it back to my lab, and sorted out the grains using a sequence of sieves of varying mesh, matched it to the known sedimentary facies from different depositional environments, and realized its origins A beach from the Silurian Period, still not entirely turned to rock.And that s when I knew that sedimentology was just as much history as scientific method.Stephen Jay Gould tells us to forget everything we think we know...Stephen Jay Gould performs a really unlikely feat in this book he makes arthropods as fascinating as dinosaurs In fact he makes a subject that could be extra ordinarily dull the process of taxonomic class...I fell in love with dinosaurs when I was 8, about the time I fell in love with horses My passion for fantasy and science fiction followed later, during my teenage years I ve never gotten over any of them I d heard about the paleontological discoveries in the Burgess Shale in Canadian Rockies , first described in the earky 1900s and then re analyzed with startlingly different results in the 1970s and 1980s The Burgess Shale deposits date from the early Cambrian period, roughly 560 million ye I fell in love with dinosaurs when I was 8, about the time I fell in love with horses My passion for fantasy and science fiction followed later, during my teenage years I ve never gotten over any of them I d heard about the paleontological discoveries in the Burgess Shale in Canadian Rockies , first described in the earky 1900s and then re an...

Wonderful Life
  • English
  • 10 August 2018
  • Paperback
  • 352 pages
  • 039330700X
  • Stephen Jay Gould
  • Wonderful Life