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Loading... Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of Historypor Stephen Jay Gould
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adorará Adira ao LibraryThing para descobrir se gostará deste livro.  karja | Oct 16, 2009 |  I highly recommended this book. The book contains Gould's beliefs on evolution and the nature of history - which are told through a case study of the Burgess Shale in British Columbia (a small limestone quarry which formed 530 million years ago) and its discovery. Gould is an absolutely fascinating scientific thinker, and should be read by anyone with an interest in evolutionary theory. Gould demonstrates how evolution cannot be a progressive process, and is merely contingent on the happenings of history; he also demonstrates how "objective" scientific discoveries can be completely based on subjective biases. Gould's writing is also very accessible, and avoids use of heavy scientific jargon. (  )1  scotttrent | Oct 12, 2009 | Not Good: This book is quoted so often in the literature that I thought I was going to read something profound. It isn't. Conway Morris and others were right to criticize it. Not sure what all the fuss is about. As a well reasoned argument Gould missed the mark. iayork | Aug 9, 2009 | Si Stephen Jay Gould nous réserve bien des découvertes lors de chacune des lectures de ses livres, la vie est belle nous embarque 500 millions d'années en arrière et témoigne de toute la remise en question nécessaire à une précise compréhension d'une découverte fabuleuse, la faune fossilisée du Schiste de Burgess. L'imprévision de l'évolution nous réserve encore bien des surprises! (  ) Christophe-Rosset | Feb 22, 2009 | Great book by Gould. One of his best. ( ) yapete | May 31, 2008 |  sem resenhas | adicionar uma resenha
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Gould describes how the Burgess Shale fauna was discovered, reassembled, and analyzed in detail so clear that the reader actually gets some feeling for what paleobiologists do, in the field and in the lab. The many line drawings are unusually beautiful, and now can be compared to a wonderful collection of photographs in Fossils of the Burgess Shale by Derek Briggs, one of Gould's students.
Burgess Shale animals have been called a "paleontological Rorschach test," and not every geologist by any means agrees with Gould's thesis that they represent a "road not taken" in the history of life. Simon Conway Morris, one of the subjects of Wonderful Life, has expressed his disagreement in Crucible of Creation. Wonderful Life was published in 1989, and there has been an explosion of scientific interest in the pre-Cambrian and Cambrian periods, with radical new ideas fighting for dominance. But even though many scientists disagree with Gould about the radical oddity of the Burgess Shale animals, his argument that the history of life is profoundly contingent--as in the movie It's a Wonderful Life, from which this book takes its title--has become more accepted, in theories such as Ward and Brownlee's Rare Earth hypothesis. And Gould's loving, detailed exposition of the labor it took to understand the Burgess Shale remains one of the best explanations of scientific work around. --Mary Ellen Curtin
(retirado da Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:51 -0400)
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Ligações Rápidas |
| eLivros | Áudio | Troca |
| — | — | 4/13 |
1. een begin met een grote dispariteit aan levensvormen;
2. een vrij plotse decimering van het aantal vormen;
3. een geleidelijke diversificatie van soorten binnen de overgebleven vormen.
Contingentie speelt een belangrijke rol in de selectie en dus in de evolutie van het leven. Het ontstaan van de mens is dus niet voorspelbaar (Sterke afhankelijkheid van beginvoorwaarden).
Zou het ontstaan een evenwaardige intelligentievorm aan die van de mens onvermijdelijk zijn?