Contingency versus inevitability: a review and reinterpretation of Stephen Jay Gould’s book “Wonderful Life—The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History”

Abstract

In 1989, Stephen Jay Gould published his Wonderful Life: “High in the Canadian Rockies is a small limestone quarry formed 530 million years ago called the Burgess Shale. It holds 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”. Gould, based upon a reinterpretation of the famous fossils from the Burgess Shale, proposed a conclusion that was revolutionary at the time, because it was centred on the notion of contingency in the course of biological evolution. The very last paragraph displayed in particular the following sentences: “This response does not cite a single law of nature; it embodies no statement about predictable evolutionary pathways, no calculation of probabilities based on general rules of anatomy or ecology. I do not think that any ‘higher’ answer can be given, and I cannot imagine that any resolution could be more fascinating.” In this essay, I intend to criticise Gould’s conclusions and to provide a new reinterpretation of the history of life, based not on contingency but on the inevitability of evolution.