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Wonderful Life (book)
''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 was the 1991 winner of The Aventis Prizes for Science Books, and a 1991 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
==Summary==
Gould's thesis in ''Wonderful Life'' was that chance was one of the decisive factors in the evolution of life on earth. He based this argument on the wonderfully preserved fossil fauna of the Burgess Shale, animals from around 505 million years ago, just after the Cambrian explosion. Gould argued that although the Burgess animals were all exquisitely adapted to their environment, most of them left no modern descendants and, more importantly, surviving creatures did not seem better adapted than their now extinct contemporaneous neighbors.
Gould proposed that given a chance to "rewind the universe" and flip the coin of natural selection again, we might find ourselves living in a world populated by descendants of ''Hallucigenia'' rather than ''Pikaia''. This seems to indicate that fitness for existing conditions does not ensure long-term survival, especially when conditions change rapidly, and that the survival of many species depends more on chance events and features, which Gould terms exaptations, fortuitously beneficial under future conditions than on features best adapted under the present environment (see also extinction event).
Gould regarded ''Opabinia'' as so important to understanding the Cambrian explosion that he wanted to call his book ''Homage to Opabinia''.
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
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