This complex, witty, erudite book can be read at many levels. Those interested only in the overall conceptual framework may wish to skip the section detailing the painstaking researches of the Cambridge trio. Yet to do so would be a real pity since, as Gould so often notes, there is beauty in detail. Gould is a lucid writer, remarkably free of the strident hyperbole that so often taints scientists who become media gurus or popularizers. To those of us involved in the manufacture and dissemination of information the book has much to say about hierarchies in science, scientific administration, attitudes to learning, universities, graduate students and pithy comments about the dimensions of knowledge production, scientific temperaments and imagination.
Wonderful Life is truly a wondrous book.
Little quirks at the outset, occurring for no particular reason, unleash cascades of consequences that make a particular future inevitable in retrospect. But the slightest early nudge contacts a different groove, and history veers into another plausible channel, diverging continually from its original pathway. The end results are so different, the initial perturbation so apparently trivial.