The conventional view is wrong - just how wrong, scientists are only beginning to realize. Primates, from a stoop-shouldered monkey dragging its long arms in the mud, to a more upright but still rather slovenly looking Neanderthal, to a clean-shaven country-club version of Homo sapiens. Importance of cultural iconography, has spent years collecting cartoons and advertisements that illustrate the conventional view of human evolution, the view we all carry around in our heads. Have abandoned the idea that God designed the world for our personal benefit, we may nevertheless be clinging to a few prejudices of a different sort - that evolution means progress, for example. We are the capable and well-designed creature atop the evolutionary ladder. Then, suddenly, life as we know it - complex, multifarious, beastly life - exploded into existence all across the planet and began evolving in earnest.Įons later, a certain hairy, two-legged species has come to think of itself as the crowning achievement of this process. True, for a few billion years before that, single-cell algae and bacteria filled the planet's seas and swamps, but these organisms were not doing much to engage It was not long before this lucky accident that earthly life began its copious parade. They are certainly the weirdest animal fossils ever found, and they could easily be - as Stephen Jay Gould argues in his extraordinary book ''Wonderful Life'' - the most important.

One fine day a half-billion years ago, an underwater mud slide (or some other catastrophe) buried a mob of strange creatures in what has now become a slab of exposed rock known as the Burgess Shale, high up in western Canada's The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. Section 7, Column 1 Book Review Deskīy JAMES GLEICK James Gleick, the author of ''Chaos: Making a New Science,'' is writing a biography of the physicist Richard Feynman. October 22, 1989, Sunday, Late Edition - Final The New York Times: Book Review Search Article

Chaos book james gleick