Wonderful Life: the Burgess Shale and the Nature of History.

From: The Economist (US) | Date: December 16, 1989 | Copyright information

GOD, as Mies van der Rohe once said, is Gin the details. His dictum applies as much to palaeontology as to architecture; except that, for explanatory purposes at least, most palaeontologists prefer Darwin to God. It was through the study of details, like the shapes of local finches' beaks on the Galapagos islands, that Darwin arrived at the theory of natural selection. It is from the anatomical details of life on the sea-floor 600m years ago that Stephen jay Gould produces a fascinating essay on the extent to which the history of life on earth has been ruled by chance.

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