Any one who reads that book and attempts to understand that all those fossils result in all that is alive today.
Later scholars and other finds augment the basics of the original schlorship but it all puts the dinosaur arguments to trivial nothingness when there is serious study of the process of biological change over time
>>My response is to recommend the book Wonderful Life by Stephen J Gould. It is the scholarly story of three individuals that studied the fossils in the Burgess Shale. That is a geologic formation high in the Canadian Rockies.
Any one who reads that book and attempts to understand that all those fossils result in all that is alive today.
Thanks. That is a wonderful book. It has been in my library for years. This is one of my favorite passages:
“Several of my colleagues (Jaanusson, 1981; Runnegar, 1987) have suggested that we eliminate the confusion about diversity by restricting this vernacular term to the first sense-number of species. The second sense-difference in body plans-should then be called disparity. Using this terminology, we may acknowledge a central and surprising fact of life’s history-marked decrease in disparity followed by an outstanding increase in diversity within the few surviving designs. . . Measured as number of species, Burgess [Shale] diversity is not high. This fact embodies a central paradox of early life: How could so much disparity in body plans evolve in the apparent absence of substantial diversity in number of species? of vertebrates? or of life on land? or simply of multicellular persistence for 600 million difficult years? “ [The Meanings of Diversity and Disparity, in Stephen Jay Gould, “Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History.” W. W. Norton & Company, 1989, Chap. I, pp.48-49]
For all practical purposes, Gould said that Darwinian evolution, which predicted diversity before disparity, is falsified.
Mr. Kalamata
>>My response is to recommend the book Wonderful Life by Stephen J Gould. It is the scholarly story of three individuals that studied the fossils in the Burgess Shale. That is a geologic formation high in the Canadian Rockies.
Bert, are you familiar with paleontologist Kurt Wise who was one of Gould’s graduate students at Harvard? In the following segment of a lecture on the fossil record, Wise discusses disparity vs. diversity. He references Gould’s book “Wonderful Life” (but not by name) and the Burgess Shale about 6 minutes in:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKuFQLkFW7o&list=PLrCQerz2L0IfnffPfmHHZz06v-Eu60sZ7&index=8&t=24m39s
Mr. Kalamata