Wonderful Life Quotes

“Alter any event, ever so slightly and without apparent importance at the time, and evolution cascades into radically different channel.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History

“Consider the magnitude of this... Taxonomists have described almost a million species of arthropods, and all fit into four major groups; one quarry in British Columbia, representing the first explosion of multicellular life, reveals more than twenty additional arthropod designs!”
― Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History

“Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History

“The history of life is a story of massive removal followed by differentiation within a few surviving stocks, not the conventional tale of steadily increasing excellence, complexity, and diversity.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History

“Genius has as many components as the mind itself.”
― stephen jay gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History

“Some fifteen to twenty Burgess species cannot be allied with any known group, and should probably be classified as separate phyla. Magnify some of them beyond the few centimeters of their actual size, and you are on the set of a science-fiction film...”
― Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History

“The idea of decimation as a lottery converts the new iconography of the Burgess Shale into a radical view about the pathways of life and the nature of history. ... May our poor and improbable species find joy in its new-found fragility and good fortune! Wouldn't anyone with the slightest sense of adventure, or the most weakly flickering respect for intellect, gladly exchange the old cosmic comfort for a look at something so weird and wonderful - yet so real - as *Opabinia*?”
― Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History

“A project like the Burgess revision has potentially flashy and predictably less noticeable aspects. Both are necessary. A conventional reporter will convey only the hot ideas and the startling facts -- Hallucigenia gets ink, the Burgess trilobites get ignored.

But the Burgess oddballs mean little in isolation. When placed in an entire fauna, filled with conventional elements as well, they suggest a new view of life. The conventional creatures must be documented with just as much love, and just as assiduously -- for they are every bit as important to the total picture.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History

“Environments without oxygen are excellent for the preservation of soft parts: no oxidation, no decay by aerobic bacteria. Such conditions are common on earth, particularly in stagnant basins. But the very conditions that promote preservation also decree that few organisms, if any, make their natural home in such places.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History

“La nueva interpretación de la fauna de Burguess Shale es una de las transformaciones más invisibles por dos razones básicas, pero su capacidad para modificar nuestra concepción de la vida no puede ser igualada por ningún otro descubrimiento paleontológico.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History

“Algunas transformaciones son manifiestas y heroicas; otras son tranquilas y sin acontecimientos notables en su devenir, pero no menos importantes en su resultado.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History

“¿Por qué el origen de la vida pluricelular se dio en forma de un corto pulso a través de tres faunas radicalmente diferentes , y no como un aumento lento y continuo de complejidad? La historia de la vida es infinitamente fascinante, infinitamente curiosa, pero ciertamente no es la sustancia de nuestros pensamientos y esperanzas usuales.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History

“Thus, physics and astronomy relegated our world to a corner of the cosmos, and biology shifted our status from a simulacrum of God to a naked, upright ape.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History