Reddit mentions of Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History

I'll stick to recommending science communication books (those that don't require a deep background on biological concepts):

• On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection - Charles Darwin, bonus points if you can get a 1st edition reprint (before his colleagues made him change a lot of important things); it is a must-read but it might need quite some time to truly understand it, it is a heavy read.
  
  
• A lot of people recommend the Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins but that one is one of his most controversial books and if you decide to read it, you should take everything with a pinch of salt; for Dawkins I prefer to recommend the Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution and the Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design. Just beware of Dawkins, he's a little dogmatic in his approach.
  
  
• The Dialectical Biologist - Richard Levins & Richard Lewontin.
  
  
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas Kuhn, this one will change forever your conception of science as a whole.
  
  
• The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley.
  
  
• Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, and the Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History - Stephen J. Gould.
  
  
• The Ghosts of Evolution: Non-sensical Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronisms - Connie Barlow.
  
  
• Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? - Frans de Waal, this one is about animal cognition but has an incredible underline of all the deficiencies and prejudges on science.
  
  
• Microbe Hunters - Paul de Kruif.
  
  
• Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution, and What is Life? - Lynn Margulis.
  
  
• The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan.
  
  
• A Short Story of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson.
  
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  For books that everyone studying biology ends up reading, my candidate would be Lehninger's Principles of Biochemistry, by Nelson & Cox but that's a textbook.

The fossils of Anomalorcis come from one of the greatest Cambrian-period fossils finds of all time, the Burgess Shale. The Burgess Shale is filled with HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of fossils and soft-tissue impressions, and has become a treasure-trove of some weird-ass-shit animals. A lot of the stuff discovered there is relatively normal, like trilobites and jellyfish, but then there's some stuff that looks like it came out of a Salvadore Dali painting. Hallucogenia, for example, or Opabinia. Wiwaxia looks like a cross between a porcupine and a turtle, while Marrella looks like a Vorlon ship from Babylon 5.

There's a great book out there by the noted paleontologist/biologist Stephen J Gould called Wonderful Life; The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. It's a fascinating read and talks about just how bizarre life was during the Cambrian, when a lot of experimental evolution was going on. I highly suggest you get the book and read it.

I'm not entirely sure if you're missing the /s or not, but just in case... hi there! I'm an evolutionary biologist. Happy to answer any questions you may have. One of the more recent visualizations of evolution that I find to be quite compelling is watching bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics on a large petri dish.

If microbes are too strange for your taste, we can stick to vertebrates and talk about guppies in Trinidad evolving similar traits when exposed to the same environmental conditions or maybe mice with higher voluntary wheel running behavior evolving a reduced hind limb muscle mass. These are physical changes in form documented in real time by researchers alive today.

If the short term stuff doesn't do it for you, we can talk about larger scale transitions in form like the shift from fins to limbs supported by evidence from fossils such as Tiktaalik or the fact that monotremes are so weird because they behave almost entirely like mammals except they lay eggs like their non-mammalian ancestors and sister group - the reptiles. Personally, I'm partial to the seemingly anomalous things that show that form isn't quite so unique, like cephalopod eyes evolving independently from vertebrate eyes or frogfish that use their limbs to produce walk-like gaits. There really aren't that many specialties or one-off cases in the history of life on our planet.

If you're interested in this kind of thing, a book I read recently that discusses hundreds more examples from researchers working today whose peer-reviewed publications you can read anywhere online (I'll help you get a copy if you're paywalled) is [Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution](https://www.amazon.com/Improbable-Destinies-Chance-Future-Evolution/dp/0399184929 by Professor Jonathan Losos). For more classic but still accessible material, I recommend anything by Stephen Jay Gould. If you've got a Netflix account and don't have time to read a book, try a glass of wine on a Friday night with David Attenborough's soothing voice in Planet Earth II, which talks about evolution here and there though it is not the central theme to the series.

Evolutionary biology is an established scientific field. There are international conferences where thousands of researchers at every stage of their career congregate to discuss research and methods and criticize each other until only the well-refuted truths remain. A lot of research in evolution is about natural history, yes, but a lot of research also has direct implications for handling disease outbreaks and antibiotic resistance, for managing agricultural industries, for supporting fisheries and sustainable farming, for treating cancers and providing earlier screening for life-threatening diseases, and so much more. The next time you're trolling about evolution online, consider the fact that your words are directly going against these aspects of our human society, and the more you fight it, the further micro-delay you add to solutions we could already be developing to handle quite a number of human-wide issues. Some issues that are directly relevant for you if you eat food, live outside of a sterilized cell, and have a mortal human body.

A great place to start on evolutionary biology are the essays of Stephen J Gould. Wonderful Life is a good place to start.

Annals of the Former World

When Life Nearly Died

Wonderful Life

Anything by Stephen Jay Gould for evolution, zoology, and earth science. Some of the science is dated - he passed in 2002 - but he always gives a comprehensive read of his subject material without being dry or overly academic.

In particular, Wonderful Life tells the story of the Burgess Shale, which details the discovery of a trove of unknown extinct species. The science has been updated since - see The Crucible of Creation - but Gould tells a better story.

Along these lines, also check out The Dinosaur Heresies by Robert Bakker.

"Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History", where Stephen J. Gould examines and critiques an interpretation of the Cambrian Explosion by its discoverer, Charles Walcot. This critique of Walcot's assumption of evolution towards higher and higher forms. For example the classic monkey to man illustration, with its intermediate hominids.

During this critique, he takes you through all the back ground info, from the anoxic ocean basins that became the various shales, to the classification of fauna to the detail of types of leg joints.

http://www.amazon.com/Wonderful-Life-Burgess-Nature-History/dp/039330700X

There's a great book on the topic "Wonderful Life". Good reading:

http://www.amazon.com/Wonderful-Life-Burgess-Nature-History/dp/039330700X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254329511&sr=1-2

Yes, I should I left this one as well:
http://www.amazon.com/Wonderful-Life-Burgess-Nature-History/dp/039330700X

For $4(used), you can read one of the best stories ever told. And be provided with evidence to back it up.