This table is from the first description of the Burgess Shale findings, Charles D. Walcott's Cambrian Geology and Paleontology (1910), courtesy of Stanford University via Google Books. (Learned of it here.)What Walcott found in the shale was an unimagined wealth of phylla, most now extinct. It showed that evolution wasn't a single linear thing, every line continued in some form, but a terrible winnowing, most lines cut off. What Gould found in it was a profound sense of our own contingency. During the Cambrian explosion, there was no way to know which phylla would survive the contingencies of selection. Indeed, if one tried to "turn the tape back" one would find it impossible to arrive once again at our same present, so complicated and contingent a
story is it. It is an awe-ful chosenness, this natural selection.The cleverest reference to the Burgess Shale with respect to religion (besides B's insight that Gould's ideas of contingency and chosenness are themselves of religious shape) came, of all places, in Christopher Hitchens' God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, where, with less awe than Schadenfreude, he describes the vertigo which the contingency of religious history should present to any current monotheist. Could not Gnosticism as easily have won the day as Christianity? Hitchens recalls a tale of Borges' about just such a parallel reality (here Dante wrote a lovely account of the Gnostic "Barbelo"!) and - here the stroke of genius - coins the phrase "Borges shale" for "the verve and imagination needed to visualize a cross section of evolutionary branches and bushes, with the extraordinary but real possibility that a different stem or line (or tune or poem) had predominated in the labyrinth" (114).
Gould's lesson from the abyss of the Burgess Shale is what you might call an untriumphal tenderness toward all life. There are traces of tenderness in Hitchens, too, behind and driving his rage against the religion machine...
