Wonderful Life

Gould, S. J. (1989). Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. W. W. Norton.

Type

Book

Intellectual base

Review or monograph

Year

1989

Link

https://wwnorton.com/books/Wonderful-Life

Cited from

architecture_urban_planning, political_science

Cited by

3 citations across 3 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Critical Juncture
  • Reversing speciation is effectively impossible: the species cannot be recombined — Gould (1989), in his "replay the tape" thought experiment, argues that such evolutionary contingencies would not recur identically if history were rerun.

    This sourceThe "replay the tape" thought experiment argues evolutionary outcomes are radically contingent — rerunning history would not reproduce the same lineages; supports the speciation-contingency / non-recurrence claim.

• Design Patterns

  • This sourceExamines the Burgess Shale's record of disparate body plans and the role of contingency in evolutionary history. Cited inline in §8 (tier B). NOTE: Gould's central thesis stresses contingency/non-repeatability rather than convergence; see prose flag.

Mechanisms

• Replicate-Foundation Experiment
  • Its strength is that it distinguishes contingent from robust outcomes with evidence rather than argument — the "replaying the tape of life" question of whether a different start yields a different end.

Verification

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Links previously used in the corpus

Before the registry existed this work was also linked 1 other way.

• https://openlibrary.org/books/OL2058366M/Wonderful_life ×1

Registry ID ref:0a2d4d090c66 · see in the full table