from Stephen Jay Gould's book Wonderful Life. ISBN 0-393-30700-X, WW Norton.

summary: tells the story of the precambrian explosion and the Burgess Shale in three ways:

• a piece of the history of science
• a lesson in paleontology, biology, and anatomy
• a philisophical/political/moral story: a debunking of evolution as a linear march of progress and a cone of increasing diversity --- and their anthropocentrism and racist connections.

for example on p28

The familiar iconographies of evolution are all directed---sometimes crudely, sometimes subtly---toward reinforcing a comfortable iew of human inevitability and superiority. The starkest version, the chain of being or ladder of linear progress, has an ancient, pre-evolutionary pedigree (see A. O Lovejoy's classic, The Great Chain of Being, 1936) Consider for example, Alexander Pope's Essay on Man
Far as creation's ample range extends
The scale of sensual, mental powers ascends:
Mark how it mounts, to man's imperial race,
From the green myriads in the peopled grass.

p43 ... this error infests technical as well as lay discourse, an editorial in Science constructs an order every bit as motley and senseless as White's ``regular gradation''. Commenting on species commonly used for laboratry work , the editors discuss the ``middle range'' between unicellular creatures and guess who at the apex: ``higher on the evolutionary ladder,'' we learn, ``the nematode, the fly, and the frog have the advantage of complexity beyond the single cell, but represent far simpler species than mammals''

Gould justifies `Contingency' in natural history. His prime thought experiment is ``replay the tape, and things would turn out completely different''. The main content of the book presents evidence from the fossils of the Burgess shale. He attacks the notion of evolution as progress towards perfection, and placing homo sapiens at the apex. Gould asserts that those few phyla that survived the shale to form life as we know it today were probably `lucky' rather than `more fit': in an environmental catastrophe survival is a lottery.

Later on Gould adds without argument or elaboration ``of of the thousands [of possible histories] only a few contain anything like self consciousness". Why? it seems to me that flops (aka smarts, information processing/communication) are in the limit very cheap, but have a large advantage (especially in adaptability and handling new and different situations---eg rapid environmental change. exactly what may cause decimation). the result would be alien intelligence.