Quotes from book
Wonderful Life

Name: Wonderful Life
Author: Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay GouldOriginal title ワンダフル・ライフ : バージェス頁岩と生物進化の物語 (Japanese, 1990)

Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History is a 1989 book on the evolution of Cambrian fauna by Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. The volume made The New York Times Best Seller list, was the 1991 winner of the Royal Society's Rhone-Poulenc Prize, the American Historical Association's Forkosch Award, and was a 1991 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Gould described his later book Full House as a companion volume to Wonderful Life.

“[H]istorical science is not worse, more restricted, or less capable of achieving firm conclusions because experiment, prediction, and subsumption under invariant laws of nature do not represent its usual working methods. The sciences of history use a different mode of explanation, rooted in the comparative and observational richness in our data. We cannot see a past event directly, but science is usually based on inference, not unvarnished observation”

Stephen Jay Gould book Wonderful Life

you don't see electrons, gravity, or black holes either
Source: Wonderful Life (1989), p. 279

“The legends of fieldwork locate all important sites deep in inaccessible jungles inhabited by fierce beasts and restless natives, and surrounded by miasmas of putrefaction and swarms of tsetse flies. (Alternative models include the hundredth dune after the death of all camels, or the thousandth crevasse following the demise of all sled dogs.)”

Stephen Jay Gould book Wonderful Life

Source: Wonderful Life (1989), p. 65

“All interesting issues in natural history are questions of relative frequency, not single examples. Everything happens once amidst the richness of nature. But when an unanticipated phenomenon occurs again and again—finally turning into an expectation—then theories are overturned.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Wonderful Life

Source: Wonderful Life (1989), p. 136

“The divine tape recorder holds a million scenarios, each perfectly sensible. Little quirks at the outset, occurring for no particular reason, unleash cascades of consequences that make a particular feature seem inevitable in retrospect. But the slightest early nudge contacts a different groove, and history veers into another plausible channel, diverging continually from its original pathway. The end results are so different, the initial perturbation so apparently trivial.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Wonderful Life

Source: Wonderful Life (1989), pp. 320–321

“The animals of the Burgess Shale are holy objects—in the unconventional sense that this word conveys in some cultures. We do not place them on pedestals and worship from afar. We climb mountains and dynamite hillsides to find them. We quarry them, split them, carve them, draw them, and dissect them, struggling to wrest their secrets. We vilify and curse them for their damnable intransigence. They are grubby little creatures of a sea floor 530 million years old, but we greet them with awe because they are the Old Ones, and they are trying to tell us something.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Wonderful Life

Source: Wonderful Life (1989), p. 52

“[C]ontingency is a thing unto itself, not the titration of determinism by randomness.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Wonderful Life

Source: Wonderful Life (1989), p. 51

“An old paleontological in joke proclaims that mammalian evolution is a tale told by teeth mating to produce slightly altered descendant teeth.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Wonderful Life

Source: Wonderful Life (1989), p. 60

“I believe […] that we can still have a genre of scientific books suitable for and accessible alike to professionals and interested laypeople. The concepts of science, in all their richness and ambiguity, can be presented without any compromise, without any simplification counting as distortion, in language accessible to all intelligent people. […] I hope that this book can be read with profit both in seminars for graduate students and—if the movie stinks and you forgot your sleeping pills—on the businessman's special to Tokyo.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Wonderful Life

Preface, p. 16
Wonderful Life (1989)

“I strongly reject any conceptual scheme that places our options on a line, and holds that the only alternative to a pair of extreme positions lies somewhere between them. More fruitful perspectives often require that we step off the line to a site outside the dichotomy.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Wonderful Life

Source: Wonderful Life (1989), p. 51

Stephen Jay Gould book Wonderful Life

Alternative models include the hundredth dune after the death of all camels, or the thousandth crevasse following the demise of all sled dogs.
Source: Wonderful Life (1989), p. 65

“The beauty of nature lies in detail; the message, in generality.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Wonderful Life

Source: Wonderful Life (1989), Preface