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Title: The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals by Simon Conway Morris, Simon Conway-Morris ISBN: 0-19-286202-2 Publisher: Getty Ctr for Education in the Arts Pub. Date: December, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.18 (22 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Superb study on the Burgess Shale
Comment: Morris, one of two contemporary specialists on the Burgess Shale, has produced an exceedingly well-written survey of the Burgess shale fauna and their meaning for evolutionary biology. The book is loaded with scores of B/W photos, 4 color drawings, a 13-page glossary of terms for the uninitiated, an imaginative underwater excursis with time-travelling paleontologists to the middle Cambrian, and a chapter on developmental evolutionary genetics (wherein he argues that many Burgess forms *are* related to contemporary forms). Stephen Jay Gould's view of the significance of the Burgess Shale is that the bizarre life-forms seen then demonstrate the historical contingency of evolution--rewind the tape and let it play out again, and things would turn out differently (a la Jimmy Stewart's "Wonderful Life"). Morris's thesis is that Gould's tape-player metaphor is misleading, overemphasizing contingency at the cost of ignoring the powerful role played by ecology . One need only consider the evolution of convergent traits in insular life-forms (e.g., Australian marsupial cat-like predators) to get the point. (I should point out that I am suspicious of monolithic theories from either pole of the necessity-chance spectrum.) I find it unfortunate that Gould never discussed Bradley Efron's Bootstrap, a technique used widely in evolutionary and population genetics, or cellular automata, a la Stuart Kauffman, which give rise to the same recurrent patterns with astonishing regularity.) Morris is an adaptationist senstive to the power of ecology to shape evolution, who sees Burgess forms not as deviant freaks that accidentally went extinct but as ancestral to contemporary animals. As usual, there is likely to be truth to both positions; indeed, in some ways, their different views turn on different understandings of probability. For anyone with more than a passing interest in evolutionary biology and paleontology, who finds Gould's incessant digressions distracting, or wonders about the hypertrophy of contingency, this book should not be missed.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Fascinating Look at the Burgess Shale Organisms
Comment: Having read and loved Professor Gould's book, Wonderful Life, I have always wanted to read and learn more about the Cambrian fauna.This book was just what I was looking for. It provides information about other organisms from other Cambrian fossil localities and ties these into the Burgess Shale story. I appreciate the way Conway-Morris brings the organisms to life in his time-travel scenario. And the photographs of the fossils are beautiful! Obviously a great deal of care went into taking these unretouched photos. His disagreements with Gould are also illuminating and add depth to the book, providing another way of looking at these organisms. Conway-Morris's account of how Wiwaxia and the halkieriids tie together the Annelids, the Mollusca and the Brachiopods is particularly fascinating.
Rating: 5
Summary: Five-eyed arthropods.
Comment: A reviewer of this book explains that Opabinia could not possibly be related to the arthropods, because it has five eyes. This most erudite person seems to ignore that many present-day arthropods have, in fact, five eyes. They are called insects! Many insects have two composite eyes and three small simple eyes. Now 2+3=5, so many insects, like the cicada, etc. do have five eyes. Since insects are arthropods, five-eyed arthropods are not unheard of, and are in fact very common.
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Title: Life's Solution : Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe by Simon Conway Morris ISBN: 0521827043 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 04 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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Title: Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History by Stephen Jay Gould ISBN: 039330700X Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: January, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: The Fossils of the Burgess Shale by Derek E. G. Briggs, Douglas H. Erwin, Frederick J. Collier ISBN: 156098659X Publisher: Smithsonian Institution Press Pub. Date: September, 1995 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Life on a Young Planet : The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth by Andrew H. Knoll ISBN: 0691009783 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 17 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: In the Blink of an Eye by Andrew Parker ISBN: 0738206075 Publisher: Perseus Publishing Pub. Date: 15 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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