Evolution In Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life

The world-renowned, American paleontologist from Harvard, Stephen Jay Gould, published his book, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, in 1989, and in it, he focused primarily on the evolution of animal life in the Cambrian Period, a dispensation of the Paleozoic Era. He broached parts of the subject by presenting readers with the hypothetical scenario in which time is rewound to the beginning of evolution and asking whether or not evolutionary events would all occur exactly the same way they did in our reality. He, instead, suggested that rebooting evolution would actually subject life to all the same variables as before and, thus, practically guarantee innumerable differences in how evolution would play out.

Gould

This “ideal” condition is typically thought to be ideal for immediate environments, mind you, not ideal the world over, so take two very different animals from very different environments and note how they have similarly adapted to their respective environments like bats and

The tree sample for this study, as you can imagine, was immense — 15,000 unique tree species. According to Universiti Brunei Darussalam’s Ferry Slik, the lead author on the massive study, “You take two locations, and in each location you have a list of 20 species. Even if none of the species are the same, using the phylogeny — the family tree — you can still compare the two forests because at some level in their evolutionary past these species are all