Imagine this: Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on the very same day — February 12, 1809. One changed biology, the other changed America. And yet, as Stephen Jay Gould reminds us in his unforgettable 1993 lecture, only Lincoln’s revolution is over. Darwin’s? It’s still underway — not in science, but in how we think about ourselves.
In his lecture titled “Wonderful Life”, Gould doesn’t simply revisit Darwin’s theory of evolution. He unearths the stubborn myths we still cling to, myths that Darwin’s theory was meant to dismantle but hasn’t quite yet. This blog post is a guided tour through Gould’s ideas — a story of pedestal-smashing revelations, prehistoric puzzles, and an eerie Canadian cliffside that holds the strangest creatures you’ve never heard of.
The Pedestal We Refuse to Step Down From
Gould begins with Freud — yes, that Freud — who famously described three great scientific revolutions that each humbled humanity:
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Copernicus showed us we weren’t at the center of the universe.
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Darwin taught us we weren’t a special creation but a branch of the animal tree.
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Freud (rather immodestly) claimed to uncover the unconscious, showing we weren’t even in control of our minds.
But Freud missed a twist. Gould argues that Darwin’s revolution isn’t done because we’ve twisted evolution into something comforting. Even as we accept that we came from animals, we tell the story of life as a ladder — a glorious ascent culminating in us, the pinnacle of evolution.
We still imagine evolution as progress — from amoeba to fish, to monkey, to suited-up businessman. You’ve seen the cartoon. It’s everywhere — on coffee mugs, t-shirts, corporate brochures. It’s so ingrained in culture, even our science textbooks are filled with these subtle ladders of bias.
“We are not the inevitable goal of evolution,” Gould warns. “We are a lucky twig on a wildly branching bush of life.”
Geology’s Most Frightening Fact
Let’s go deeper. Gould, trained as a geologist, brings in one of science’s most unsettling discoveries: deep time. The Earth isn’t a few thousand years old. It’s over 4.5 billion years old. And humans? We’ve existed for the tiniest sliver of it.
To explain just how tiny that sliver is, Gould turns to metaphor — as all teachers of deep time must. His favorite? Mark Twain’s Eiffel Tower analogy:
If the Earth’s age were the Eiffel Tower, the human era would be a mere coat of paint on its tip.
That’s not just humbling — it’s disorienting. If we’re so recent, why do we think everything before us was leading to us?
The False Ladder of Progress
Gould takes a scalpel to this myth with a mix of humor and horror. He shows a series of cartoons and ads — the so-called “march of progress” — that depict evolution as a straight line from ape to man, sometimes ending in a golfer, a businessman, or a bikini model sipping Pepsi.
These aren’t harmless jokes. They reveal how deeply we've internalized the idea that evolution means improvement, always upward, always toward us.
Even scientific murals in museums — the high culture version — betray the same bias. Charles R. Knight, whose paintings defined fossil imagery in the early 20th century, shows life moving from trilobites to dinosaurs to mammals and finally humans. Invertebrates vanish after fish evolve. Fish vanish once reptiles conquer land. Reality? Those creatures didn’t go extinct. They were just erased from the frame because they weren’t "leading" to us.
What Evolution Actually Looks Like
Then Gould brings out the knockout idea: what if evolution isn’t a ladder at all, but a lottery?
He introduces an alternate diagram — not a cone of progress, but a burst of early diversity, followed by the extinction of most lineages, leaving only a few survivors that expanded later. He calls this “decimation and diversification.”
Think of the Cambrian Explosion — that dazzling moment 530 million years ago when almost all major animal body plans (phyla) emerged. In just 5 to 6 million years, the blueprint for life today was set. And then? Most of those designs went extinct.
“You don’t survive because you’re superior,” Gould says. “You survive because you’re lucky.”
If we could replay the tape of life, Gould insists, humans probably wouldn’t evolve again. Maybe something conscious would, but not us. We’re not destiny. We’re an accident of history.
Burgess Shale: A Window into the Weird
Gould’s most powerful story comes next. It’s about a cliffside in Canada called the Burgess Shale. Discovered in 1909, this deposit preserved soft-bodied creatures from the Cambrian Explosion in exquisite detail. Some looked like they were made by children with safety scissors and no instructions: claws for mouths, eyes on stalks, bodies without symmetry.
Paleontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott, who discovered the site, was so committed to a neat evolutionary ladder that he forced every bizarre creature into known groups — jamming square pegs into round phylogenetic holes.
Gould, decades later, revisited these creatures with fresh eyes. What he found were entirely unique designs, now extinct. They weren’t failed prototypes. They were alternative experiments in life. And they were snuffed out by contingency — the randomness of extinction, not inferiority.
The Real Message of Evolution
So what does all this mean?
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Evolution is not progress.
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History is not destiny.
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We are not the goal of a cosmic plan.
And that's okay.
Gould ends by embracing contingency — the “what ifs” of history. What if a pond dried up? What if a meteor missed? What if a tiny lineage had a different genetic twist? These small things shape who gets to survive.
“Random does not mean meaningless,” Gould reminds us. It means history unfolds narratively, not mathematically. We explain it with stories, not formulas.
Why This Matters Today
This isn’t just abstract philosophy. It’s a call to humility. If we’re not the inevitable apex of life, then:
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We don’t rule the Earth by right.
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Other creatures — and other futures — matter just as much.
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Our decisions shape the next branches of the tree.
Understanding evolution properly helps us respect our fragile place in nature. It might even help us survive — not as rulers of life, but as its stewards.
So the next time someone tells you evolution means “survival of the fittest,” remember Gould. And the weird Burgess Shale creatures. And the tape of life, waiting to be rewound.
Because the real wonder of life is not that we’re here — but that we could be.
Listen to the full lecture here:
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