Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould

Author:Stephen Jay Gould [Gould, Stephen Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-08-23T21:26:26+00:00

CODA

The Burgess work will continue, for many genera remain ripe for restudy (the bulk of the arthropods have been monographed, but only about half of the known weird wonders). However, Harry, Derek, and Simon are moving on, for various reasons. The Lord gives us so little time for a career—forty years if we start early as graduate students and remain in good health, fifty if fortune smiles. The Devil takes so much away—primarily in administrative burdens that fall upon all but the most resistant and singularly purposeful of SOBS. (The earthly rewards of scholarship are higher offices that extinguish the possibility of future scholarship.) You can’t spend an entire career on one project, no matter how important or exciting. Harry, in his seventies, has returned to his first love, and is spearheading a revision of the trilobite volume for the Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology. Simon’s burgeoning career includes a Burgess Shale project or two, but his main interests have moved backward in time to the Cambrian explosion itself. Derek’s expanding concerns center on weird wonders and softbodied faunas of post-Burgess times.

Others will finish this generation’s run at the Burgess Shale. And then the next generation will arrive with new ideas and new techniques. But science is cumulative, despite all its backings and forthings, ups and downs. The work of Briggs, Conway Morris, and Whittington will be honored for its elegance and for the power of its transforming ideas as long as we maintain that most precious of human continuities—an unbroken skein of intellectual genealogy.

No organism or interpretation can have the last word in such a drama, but we must respect the closure of a man’s work. The epilogue to this play belongs to Harry Whittington, who in his typically succinct and direct words, wrote to me about his Burgess monographs: “Perhaps these necessarily dry papers conveyed a little of the excitement of discovery—it certainly was an intriguing investigation which had its moments of great joy when a new and unexpected structure was revealed by preparation” (March 1, 1988). “It has been the most exciting and intriguing project that I have been associated with” (April 22, 1987).

SUMMARY STATEMENT ON THE BESTIARY OF THE BURGESS SHALE

DISPARITY FOLLOWED BY DECIMATION: A GENERAL STATEMENT

If the softbodied components had never been found, the Burgess Shale would be an entirely unremarkable Middle Cambrian fauna of about thirty-three genera. It contains a rich assemblage of sponges (Rigby, 1986) and algae, seven species of brachiopods, nineteen species of ordinary trilobites with hard parts, four of echinoderms, and a mollusk and coelenterate or two (Whittington, 1985b, pp. 133-39, presents a complete list). Among the softbodied organisms, bringing the total biota to about 120 genera, some are legitimate members of major groups. Whittington lists five certain and two probable species of priapulid worms, six species of polychaetes, and three softbodied trilobites (_Tegopelte_ and two species of Naraoia ).

My five-act drama, just concluded, emphasizes a different theme, taught to me by the softbodied components alone. The Burgess Shale includes a range

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