Wonderful Life
High in the Canadian Rockies is a small limestone quarry formed 530 million years ago called the Burgess Shale. It hold the remains of an ancient sea where dozens of strange creatures lived -- a forgotten corner of evolution preserved in awesome detail. In this book Stephen Jay Gould explores what the Burgess Shale tells us about evolution and the nature of history.
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- Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould is a lovely book about many strange organisms from this same time period. It's wild that these alien creatures were just wandering around living out their lives for millions and millions of years before we or most forms of life we would really recognize came on the scene.
- "Wonderful Life" by Stephen Jay Gould.
It might have only been a few paragraphs, but he explained that "Survival of the fittest" is not really quite how evolution works.
"Survival of the fittest" implies that species that are stronger or "better" in some way are the ones to survive and reproduce and thus "succeed" in evolutionary terms.
Stephen Jay Gould suggested that a better way of thinking about it is "Survival of the survivors", which is to say that in many cases its simply chance that allows once species to survive and thrive and breed successive generations.
- If anyone is interested in arguments about winding back the clock and replaying evolution, I highly recommended Stephen Jay Gould's "Wonderful Life."
- I also recommend the new book Improbable Destinies by Jonathan Losos, which has a big discussion on convergent evolution and the role of "replaying the tape" - it refers back a lot to Gould's book "Wonderful Life" and what new genome sequencing is revealing and how it relates to what he got right and/or got wrong and/or how he was misunderstood.
- The paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote a book called 'Wonderful Life' about the Cambrian Explosion, when mutlicellular life really got cranking. Basically at that time the ecological slate was clean, and an enormous diversity of organisms developed very quickly. All the expansion of ecological diversity was lateral--essentially green-field evolutionary innovation.
Over the next hundred million years or so, the evolutionary innovation was mostly in smaller and smaller tweaks on some evolutionary branches, and the extinction of other branches as they were outcompeted. Never again was there the same wide range of innovation and experimentation--except following expansion into new environments (e.g. when organisms moved onto land) and following mass extinction events.
It is really interesting to see how research centers like PARC develop but you're absolutely correct in that it's easier to be creative with a clean slate.
Maybe we shouldn't be trying to emulate or reproduce PARC unless we have found a new clean slate somewhere. Instead we should look to where innovation develops particularly rapidly in spite of an establishment.
- And for the Cambrian Explosion, although somehow dated now, Gould's Wonderful Life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderful_Life_(book)
