Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of Historyby Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould thought we were telling stories wrong.

He knew that narratives are powerful and necessary and says as much in his 1989 book Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, an argument for how to tell accurate stories, made through a trove of fossils discovered in the early 20th century.

In fact, storytelling – that is, imposing narrative on images – is, according to Gould, the core job of his specialty and life’s work, paleontology. After all, studying fossils doesn’t allow much by way of the classic scientific method with its hypothesis testing. Instead, you need to tell a story about how the fossil got there and what it was like when it was alive.

The problem is we tend to tell stories inaccurately.

Our mammalian brains tell simple tales, narcissistic and overdetermined. We center ourselves when, really, we’re one among many, and not particularly special at that. Worse yet, we tell stories that make the end point inevitable when detailed study shows reality is the product of contingencies that are usually lacking in any useful lesson.

Instead, we need to understand history as a logical series of events that need follow no greater rule. He writes, “Historical explanations take the form of narrative: E, the phenomenon to be explained arose because D came before, preceded by C,B, and A. If any of these earlier stages had not occurred, or had transpired in a different way, then E would not exist (or would be present in a substantially altered form, E’, requiring a different explanation).”

And that’s it! Sometimes broad forces determine A or B or C, but most of the time it’s just one damned thing after another. Deal with it.

If this all sounds rather abstract, trust me, it’s not! Gould grounds his argument in example. Two big examples, actually, along with many briefer ones. The first example is the strange, almost alien-like fauna that became the Burgess fossils 530 million years ago in what’s now British Columbia, and what they say about how life evolved. The second example is the discovery of these fossils’ true designs in the 1970s by three prudent, but ultimately revolutionary, scientists.

Gould’s ebullient voice shines through the pages. It delighted me the first time I read it and, since then, has burrowed in my head like those little mousy things that crawled out from under the rocks after the dinosaurs died, and changed my view of history.

At times, he is tedious and belaboring, but all of it is in the service of a logical argument and, as a result, I found his prose functional as well as stylish.

His simple, contingent logic (like all of history, according to Gould) makes the deepest of subjects tangible and wonderous.

I’ll sum it up here:

1. Humans are inclined toward narcissistic mythology that place ourselves, or extensions of ourselves, at the center of the story and make our own existence inevitable.

2. Exhibit A: the popular fable that evolution is a form of progress with human intelligence the inevitable endpoint.

3. Exhibit B: Charles Doolittle Walcott’s original treatment of the burgess fossils, which shoehorned them into a neat, progressive, preexisting, and wrong story.

4. Careful examination of facts reveals how wrong these stories are.

5. Exhibit C: Study of the Burgess fossils demonstrates the vast diversity of anatomical types, compared to now, among fauna after the Cambrian explosion 570 million years ago, the first time complex life appeared on Earth. Nothing in the fossil record reveals the ancestors of today’s life to have shown any general superiority or dominance at the time.

6. Therefore, in contrast to the fable of Exhibit A, today’s life is simply lucky survivors that made it through the vast pruning of the Cambrian fauna, either through chance or because their ancestors were well-adapted to the specific challenges of time and place at critical junctures, which does not demonstrate any broad bodily superiority that made them destined to be winners in evolution.

7. Because all history proceeds within the same framework, the discovery of the Burgess Fauna and what they represent over the course of the 20th century also contains many elements of lucky contingencies.

8. This is normal! Broad forces exist, but a brief summary of the evolution of life reveals the many other critical nodes humanity’s ancestors survived through lottery.

9. Therefore, today is not inevitable. In fact, it’s incredibly unlikely. History follows a logic, but the end result is entirely unpredictable and basically random.

Point One: Campfire tales about evolution to tuck us in at night

I don’t think point one will surprise anyone. We’re storytelling creatures. We like our heroes and our villains and for the good guys to win. And we like to go to sleep at night believing that the world is how it is because it has to be that way and should be.

Gould makes good use of images as he adapts popular understanding of evolution to this point. Actually, he makes great use of images and descriptive imagery throughout the book.

For example, we’re all familiar with some version of this image, the evolution of man – a clear depiction of progress as man goes from a hunched primate to a strong, upright, and modern man.

And that image, Gould points out, is part of a larger narrative about evolution, which he calls the cone of increasing diversity, the idea that today’s life is the result of billions of years of progressive complexity.

The problem is it’s classic survivor’s bias. We’re forgetting all the losers, those branches that go nowhere, many of which were perfectly well-adapted at one point to their environment and had captivating, complex designs of their own.

Gould points out that “that the vast majority of “simpler” creatures are not human ancestors or even prototypes, but only collateral branches on life’s tree.”

I’m surprised Gould even wavers between ‘tree’ and ‘bush.’ It’s clearly a bush! A vast chaotic network of branches with the greatest diversity either toward the bottom or at other major nodes that looks more like this.

As of now, there are thirty-two or so living phyla, “the fundamental ground plans for anatomy.” Among animals, they include anthropods (insects, spiders, lobsters), mollusks (clams, snails, squid), and our own glorious phyla, the chordate.

Charles Doolittle Walcott discovered the fossils of the Burgess Shale in 1909. He proceeded to shoehorn them into the living phyla of today. It made for a simple tale of primitive ancestors that later progressed into the more brilliant, complex now.

But he was wrong. Dun dun dun.

Points two and three: The truth! Secrets of the fossils.

Gould spends 126 pages describing the true anatomy of the 530-million year old fossils found in the Burgess Shale. It’s enjoyable because Gould is so evidently excited, and because he weaves it into the intellectual drama of their discovery. We are, after all, storytelling (and listening) creatures.

But I’m not going to lie to you. 126 pages is a lot of description of the anatomy of fauna and there are many times where he is describing the shape and function of body parts in ways that I found nearly impossible to follow or visualize.

Still, it’s logically necessary since Gould has some key things he needs to get across about these fauna in order for you to buy his overall argument. And, while the writing can be tedious, the pictures are just awesome.

First, these creatures are weird as hell.

Fauna today fit into basic anatomical designs (again called phyla) and there are rules about what those designs contain. Most of the Burgess creatures follow none of these rules. Here is the aptly named Hallucigenia.

This is Dinomischus. Part cue-tip, part flower (but not actually at all), that lived in open waters. See that opening at the top? That’s its mouth and anus!

I realize I’m just a layman and it’s of no particular value that I think these fauna look like freaks. But the scientists who studied these fossils also thought they were freaks, and unlikely to be the precursors of anything living today.

(By the way, if there are any major Hollywood directors reading this, please consider stealing some of these designs for movie aliens as they would be a refreshing change from humanoids, giant spiders, and octopi.)

The second thing Gould gets across is that, while the Burgess Shale was filled with weirdos and, in fact, was majority-weirdo, it wasn’t only weirdo.

This is a crustacean. And, yeah, it looks like a pretty normal crustacean.

Gould writes that the “The Burgess fauna contains both ordinary and unique anatomies in abundance.” Here’s a nice image of the Burgess fauna, teeming with both extinct designs and prototypes of modern ones.

But the prototypes of modern phyla weren’t particularly special within the burgess shale. They weren’t overrepresented. There’s no good reason to pick them as the eventual winners. They’re just there.

It’s a cliche, but it bears repeating because it so deeply contradicts what our brains want to believe. Just as Earth is the third rock from the Sun, an unremarkable star in a nondescript exurb of a completely garden-variety galaxy, chordates and the other prototypes of survivors in the Burgess fossils were once one of many phyla in a post-Cambrian explosion planet with vastly more anatomical diversity than exists today.

Gould makes the point, repeatedly, that the extinct designs were perfectly functional. This is Wiwaxia, which crawled on the sea floor while warding off predators with spikes. It’s not some primitive failed experiment but “a complete working organism – a herbivore or omnivore, living on small items of food...on the sea floor.”

So why didn’t its progeny survive? It’s not like we know precisely. But probably just bad luck.

Or, more accurately, a series of events with no generalizable lessons.

Sometimes, natural selection drives survival, but with little regard for ancestral anatomical superiority: “grubby old Buster the Lungfish…may prevail because a feature evolved long ago for a different use has fortuitously permitted survival during a sudden and unpredictable change in rules.”

Just as important, we live on a planet with mass extinctions. One of them took out 96% of living species. With a survival rate like that, good designs sometimes go extinct. Great workers don’t always survive the big layoffs.

Roll back the tape of life, Gould says, and replay it and it’s highly unlikely we’d get anything remotely like the same mix of species we have today.

Point four: how the secrets of the Burgess Fauna were discovered, a Russian doll, sort of, of contingent history

So how do we overcome our own inclination toward simple mythmaking and, therefore, tell more accurate tales of history that proceed through unlikely contingents?

Well, the stuff of science. Careful observation. Listening to the fossil record and prudently recording and analyzing your discoveries. And, also, the driving force of all history: luck.

Gould tells the story of Walcott’s three revisionists, Harry Whittington, Derek Briggs and Simon Conway Morris, who reexamined the Burgess fossils and discovered their anatomical remarkability, creating a revolution in evolutionary biology.

They were on the receiving end of improbable contingencies.

First, it’s amazing that these fossils exist at all. Fossils are rare, soft-bodied fossils rarer. And a cornucopia of soft-bodied fossils from shortly after the Cambrian explosion is the stuff of pure lottery.

Second, they were discovered through competent field work but also by incredible chance by Walcott, who was for 20 years chief administrator of the Smithsonian and, therefore, a person uniquely able to adequately preserve them.

Finally, and much less convincingly, the three scientists mixed in the special cauldron of the British university system and balanced offsetting personalities to overturn Walcott’s shoehorn, an event that was its own sort of luck. Touchingly, he gives credit, sometimes a bit excessively, to their scientific genius as he recounts how they first delicately, and then confidently, declared the anatomical uniqueness of the Burgess fauna.

Still, Gould puts a lot of faith in the three’s force of personality. The tools they used, he points out, were available in Walcott’s time. But Walcott, in his telling, was a traditionalist who needed to view “life as a single progressive chain, based on replacement by conquest and extending smoothly from the succession of organic designs through the sequence of human technologies.”

Whittington, on the other hand, was “cautious and conservative” in the right way – prudent, collaborative, and willing to listen to the evidence.

Gould, I think, is engaged in willful blindness here.

He admits that Walcott was partially a product of his time. But he won’t admit that Whittington, Briggs and Simon benefited just as much from the conceptual environment available to them as Walcott suffered from his.

First of all, Gould misclassifies Walcott. He wasn’t a generic traditionalist. He was a specific product of the early 20th century when modernism spawned competing idealisms, including Walcott’s of an ever-improving world through scientific and genetic refinement.

Whittington, Briggs, and Simon worked in our world of post-war and post-modern chaos, decades after World War II shattered any consensus that stories needed to make moral sense. Moreover, and Gould doesn’t delve into this at all, Walcott worked in the age of eugenics; Whittington et al labored after the height of Civil Rights in an intellectual environment where diversity and equality held positive connotations.

Whittington’s first major monograph of a Cambrian fauna was in 1971. Nine years earlier, Stephen Sondheim’s character sang in A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, “Where is the moral? There is no moral!”

It was a much better milieu to discover human meaninglessness!

But, Gould, of course, doesn’t care for the forces of social history that can make certain events inevitable, even if he sometimes reluctantly admits they exist.

So he does the human thing. He lionizes his colleagues. He mythologizes to avoid complicating his story.

It’s a mistake that proves the rule. We are constantly fighting, and often losing, against our own tendency toward simple storytelling.

Enter the Heel: Richard Dawkins

It wouldn’t be a Gould review if I didn’t bring in criticism by his bitter rival. The Fighting Atheist himself. Richard Dawkins.

Bitingly, Dawkins starts his review, “If only Stephen Gould could think as clearly as he writes!”

He has two main criticisms. First, he says Gould is judging the fauna by how alike they are to modern phyla, rather than how alike they were at the time. Therefore, they aren’t necessarily particularly diverse compared to today’s creatures.

I’ve turned this over in my head, but I don’t quite get it. Gould seems to think that the fauna were, indeed, quite different from each other at the time and I think he makes his case for that persuasively. Moreover, their basic anatomies are the building blocks of future evolution. How would that preclude Gould’s larger argument about the contingent nature of history?

Dawkins’ second point is basically, so what?: “Gould expects us to be surprised. Why? The view that he is attacking - that evolution marches inexorably towards a pinnacle such as man - has not been believed for 50 years… Any orthodox Darwinian would be entirely happy with major extinctions being largely a matter of luck.”

Here, Dawkins is probably on firmer ground. Gould, who died in 2002, was repeatedly criticized for misrepresenting the views of his intellectual rivals.

Still, I want to say: I’m surprised! Me! It’s not like I’ve spent all that much time considering this question directly. But, if you’d asked me before I read this book, I think I would have said that history proceeds more along the lines of how it does in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, with broad rules about where we’re going and the details and timeline hammered out by individual actors.

Evolution by winnowing early diversity, and Gould’s forceful arguments for unpredictable contingency as the driving force of that winnowing, certainly changed how I think.

I’ll also say that I was an undergraduate history major and I can tell you for sure that, while Dawkins may find Gould’s conclusions run-of-the-mill, academic historians generally see big social causes as the driving forces of history, not idiosyncratic individuals and small contingencies resulting in a world of close-to-pure chance. (They deride this, or a cousin of it, as the Great Man Theory of History.)

And, to be clear, while Gould’s argument is grounded in a natural history case study that is hundreds of millions of years old, he explicitly says that his contingent view of history applies to modern events, including the American Civil War which he briefly states he is convinced could have gone either way.

Personally, I find Gould’s joyful battle against human mythological tendencies, and his championing of life’s randomness, to be relatable. But your mileage may vary.

So…is history contingent?

Questions like this remind me of the comedian Demetri Martin’s line that Socrates could have improved his quote, "the unexamined life is not worth living" by adding “man.”

As in: “The unexamined life is not worth living, man.”

Is history contingent on critical junctures with unpredictable results and, therefore, luck the driving force of our current outcome? I think so, man.

First of all, to be clear, broad forces of history abound, less than academic historians admit but more than your average man-on-the-street probably believes.

Take the two most important figures of the civil rights movement: Martin Luther King, Jr. and Lyndon Johnson. Ask most people whether we’d be living with southern de jure apartheid in the United States past the 1960s without those two historical figures and I’d bet many, if not most, would say yes.

Personally, I’d put my money on no. Take away those two and I bet the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and Voting Rights Act, in some form, both pass in the 1960s. It was the biggest issue of the day with two-thirds public support. It was a national embarrassment at the height of America’s Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union. MLK was surrounded by other competent, notable Black activist leaders, and LBJ by other powerful civil rights-supporting politicians. I just don’t see these two individuals as the choke points of history here.[90]

But what Gould argues through case study is that the Cambrian explosion and subsequent, massive pruning of diversity was one critical node where the ancestors of everything living today survived by the logic of contingency, rather than any general rule.

“Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction,” he writes. Then later: “Each step proceeds for cause, but no finale can be specified at the start and none would ever occur a second time in the same way, because any pathway proceeds through thousands of improbable stages.”

His last thirty pages tells the story of human evolution, focused on a half dozen moments of improbable survival, each of them convincingly lucky. He admits that, at a certain point, human intelligence became inevitable — but only very late. And, in one of my favorite bits of argument in the book, he points out that it’s not like Earth has unlimited time to try out every combination; we’ve already used up more than half of Earth’s lifespan.

Once you see some of these critical, and improbable, nodes, you see them everywhere.

They are at least as common as the big forces.

Most of my nonfiction reading is on relatively modern political events and not natural history. So where Gould stops, the arrival of Homo Sapiens, I’ll posit some counterfactuals. Here are three, in my opinion, plausible ones, contingencies of little importance at the time that changed the course of history.

1. China adopts a small alphabet and Europe adopts a large one. This is one of those quirks of history, a small thing that mattered only much later. Movable type actually was invented about 400 years earlierin China than Europe, but the super long alphabet made it not very functional. Say Europe got the long alphabet and China got the short one. Knowledge spreads faster in China for hundreds of years, giving it that critical edge as the world moves into the 1500s. Are the Americas colonized from the East, spurring an age of East Asian wealth extraction and knowledge revolution that sets the post-Middle Ages stage of history in motion? Is Western Europe today, and much of the rest of the world, just crawling out from under the yoke of 500 years of East Asian, rather than Western European, domination?

2. Napoleon isn’t born. Does some version of the Louisiana Purchase happen? Sure, probably. Revolutions tend to be the kind of thing that forces you to sell some assets for a song. Does The French Revolution spill over into some sort of European continental war? I buy it, revolutions tend to go that way. But, still, Napoleon is such a singular figure. Without him, that war doesn’t reach Russia’s border. And, with that gone, so goes a good chunk of Russia’s 19th century national mythology (and all the best books 😔), Russian self-image as they battled the Nazis (if there are Nazis, in our hypothetical second timeline), a good chunk of Britain’s 19th century foreign policy, and the workings of thirty years of continental Europe’s failed attempts to balance powers against the rising forces of liberalism. History without him just seems very, very different.

3. In 1980, Ronald Reagan, as mercurial a president as any in history save Donald Trump, picks another member from his short list, Donald Rumsfeld, for vice president in lieu of George H.W. Bush. In 1988, Rumsfeld is elected president (he considered running, in the timeline you’re reading this in). And the Cold War winds down with the chest-thumping, bellicose Rumsfeld as president, rather than prudent Bush. Does America go to war with the falling Soviet Union? It’s possible. Does America march into Baghdad and topple Saddam in the first Gulf War in 1991? Oh, absolutely. I mean, Rumsfeld did it – or, more precisely, was one of three or four central players – the first chance he got 10 years later.

   You can argue that this is just a detail. The U.S. was bound to catastrophically overreach in the Middle East. And sure, fine! But toppling Saddam ten years earlier seems like a pretty big deal! For American history, for Middle Eastern history, and certainly for the 45 million people who live in Iraq. All contingent on a perfectly plausible and not terribly scrutinized political decision made 11 years before 1991.

Gould has converted me.

Large forces of history surround us but they’re connected by critical nodes, which could go either way, producing the contingent and practically random result of the world we have today.

The human being in me still wants a moral.

Gould writes that he finds this exhilarating. He’s grateful he’s alive. It’s a wonderful life and it almost didn’t happen.

Though I suppose it’s possible you’re miserable and history’s contingencies, like dominoes since the dawn of time, have led to this unlikely moment.

In which case: I’m sorry this happened to you.