Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History Read Free Page B

(see figure 1.1), though both are ranked among the unplaceable arthropods today. The modern version features the unique phyla—giant Anomalocaris; Opabinia with its five eyes and frontal “nozzle”; Wiwaxia with its covering of scales and two rows of dorsal spines.
    3.Knight’s creatures obey the convention of the “peaceable kingdom.” All are crowded together in an apparent harmony of mutual toleration; they do not interact. The modern version retains this unrealistic crowding (a necessary tradition for economy’s sake), but features the ecological relations uncovered by recent research: priapulid and polychaete worms burrow in the mud; the mysterious Aysheaia grazes on sponges; Anomalocaris everts its jaw and crunches a trilobite.
    4.Consider Anomalocaris as a prototype for Whittington’s revision. Knight includes two animals omitted from the modern reconstruction: jellyfish and a curious arthropod that appears to be a shrimp’s rear end covered in front by a bivalved shell. Both represent errors committed in the overzealous attempt to shoehorn Burgess animals into modern groups. Walcott’s “jellyfish” turns out to be the circlet of plates surrounding the mouth of Anomalocaris ; the posterior of his “shrimp” is a feeding appendage of the same carnivorous beast. Walcott’s prototypes for two modern groups become body parts of the largest Burgess oddball, the appropriately named Anomalocaris .
    Thus a complex shift in ideas is epitomized by an alteration in pictures. Iconography is a neglected key to changing opinions, for the history and meaning of life in general, and for the Burgess Shale in stark particulars.

    1.1. Reconstruction of the Burgess Shale fauna done by Charles R. Knight in 1940, probably the model for his 1942 restoration. All the animals are drawn as members of modern groups. Above Sidneyia , the largest animal of the scene, Waptia is reconstructed as a shrimp. Two parts that really belong to the unique creature Anomalocaris are portrayed respectively as an ordinary jellyfish (top, left of center) and the rear end of a bivalved arthropod (the large creature, center right, swimming above the two trilobites).

    1.2. A modern reconstruction of the Burgess Shale fauna, illustrating an article by Briggs and Whittington on the genus Anomalocaris . This drawing, unlike Knight’s, features odd organisms. Sidneyia has been banished to the lower right, and the scene is dominated by two specimens of the giant Anomalocaris . Three Aysheaia feed on sponges along the lower border, left of Sidneyia . An Opabinia crawls along the bottom just left of Aysheaia . Two Wiwaxia graze on the sea floor below the upper Anomalocaris .
    T HE L ADDER AND THE C ONE : I CONOGRAPHIES OF P ROGRESS
    Familiarity has been breeding overtime in our mottoes, producing everything from contempt (according to Aesop) to children (as Mark Twain observed). Polonius, amidst his loquacious wanderings, urged Laertes to seek friends who were tried and true, and then, having chosen well, to “grapple them” to his “soul with hoops of steel.”
    Yet, as Polonius’s eventual murderer stated in the most famous soliloquy of all time, “there’s the rub.” Those hoops of steel are not easily unbound, and the comfortably familiar becomes a prison of thought.
    Words are our favored means of enforcing consensus; nothing inspires orthodoxy and purposeful unanimity of action so well as a finely crafted motto—Win one for the Gipper, and God shed his grace on thee. But our recent invention of speech cannot entirely bury an earlier heritage. Primates are visual animals par excellence, and the iconography of persuasion strikes even closer than words to the core of our being. Every demagogue, every humorist, every advertising executive, has known and exploited the evocative power of a well-chosen picture.
    Scientists lost this insight somewhere along the way. To be sure, we use pictures more than most scholars, art historians excepted. Next