© 1990 Cindy Hopper
© 1990 ANZURA, Australia & New Zealand Urantia Association
Reprinted with permission from PRINTS OF PEACE, Vol IV, No 3, February 1990.
This is a brief summary of an interesting documentary I saw in early January on CBC’s, “The Journal”. It was about the creatures of the Burgess Shale in Yoho National Park in the Canadian Rockies. Between the layers of rock there are the most finely detailed fossils in the world, showing everything from the hairs on their legs, to their last meal. Some 530 million years ago, this area was completely submerged and in this Cambrian ocean lived a bizarre collection of beasties the likes of which have all but disappeared from the earth’s unique fauna. One day, long ago, a mud slide conspired to preserve for us a perfect record of these creatures who lived during one of the most important periods of our geologic history; that 100 million year period during which life on earth blossomed. It was called the Cambrian Explosion, which started about 570 million years ago. Since then, the elements have whittled away at the peaks and exposed the story of their creation.
Life on earth evolved quickly from glorified algae to the ancestors of all modern life. Its preservation here was a geologic accident. The shale was once a cliff, a sheer drop to the bottom of a salt water sea and its inhabitants were the teeming underwater curiosities of Cambrian life.
The mudslide swept the animals off the cliff and buried them in sediment. Trapped where there was no oxygen, the animals did not decay, they were simply pressed slowly into the rock, completely intact. For years, palaeontologists have been chipping away at layers of slate in the hope that each one will tell us something more. The incredible diversity of the animals has a few scientists wondering if our current model of evolution is in need of revision.
What this all means is still open to interpretation. At Harvard, palaeontologist Stephen J. Gould, has written a book, called “Wonderful Life” which is an examination of the possible meaning of the fossil record. In a interview, Gould says: “The Burgess shale represents the most soft bodied fauna we have from the most important time in the history of life (with the exception of the fateful differentiation of the frog, of course!). The fossil record for the most part only involved the hard parts of organisms and they were not very informative. Most animals don’t have hard parts. The hard parts of certain creatures are very uninformative, if you only had a snail shell, you wouldn’t know what a snail looked like. So every once in a while, when geological circumstances conspire to preserve the soft parts of organisms, we get a precious window into the true diversity of life in the past”.
The diverse Burgess creatures are a motley crew. “Canadaspis, was a scavenging beast with 16 legs, five eyes and a armoured plated body about three inches long. Sontacharis, also known as Santa Claus, had a huge grasping mouth, well fed though it may have been, it was an evolutionary dead end”, said Des Collins, who is a palaeontologist at Royal Ontario Museum. He has studied the creatures of the Burgess Shale for a long time. Collins described one of the fossils dubbed “Hallucigenia” as a small animal about an inch long, with seven pairs of toothpick-like legs, a tentacle per set of legs with a mouth on the end of it. Hallucigenia shuffled around the bottom of the Cambrian sea looking for whatever settled there and presumably ate it.
Another one had “… five eyes in the middle of its head, two pairs, with one in the middle of its forehead. Out the front it had a trunk like an elephant with a claw at the end, and also had a tail like a bonanza aircraft” (Des Collins). It was Charles D. Walcot who stumbled across the exposed rock on a holiday 80 years ago. He was one of very few in the world who could have understood what he had chanced upon. Walcot led several later expeditions to the shale, a rock face 10 feet high and about a city block long. It was a series of marvellous coincidences which came together to both preserve, then uncover the creatures of the Burgess Shale. After all of the animals were compressed into rock, centuries of mountain building, earthquakes and other geologic activity occurred where the earth was literally hewn asunder, yet these very delicate fossils survived. The slightest bit of stirring could have ruined the fossils.
The Burgess Shale was uncovered in 1909, but it wasn’t until the late 1970 's that its true significance could be appreciated. The shale contains the ancestors of all current life forms on earth, but it also contains about 15 or 20 alien creatures presumed to be unrelated to any current species alive on the planet.
“It means that life 530 million years ago was actually more varied than it is now. There were more anatomical blueprints, more basic body plans from which life could have later evolved. Now this does not sit all that well with our current view of evolution as an orderly progression from orderly to complex, from few to many”. (Stephen J. Gould)
At the time of his discovery, Walcot interpreted what he had found in a traditional way. He assumed all those organisms were simply the precursors of things that came later. The re-interpretation is quite the opposite. It says that the maximal diversity was reached at the Cambrian Explosion and the later history of life is one of restriction and decimation.
Dr. Gould believes that most of what we take for granted concerning evolution is basically wrong. The traditional view is of a tree rooted in a single spot branching out and up. Instead Gould says that the Burgess animals offer us a kind of peculiar bush, at the bottom is the initial explosion. Periodic extinctions reduce the groups with the survivors spreading out to form today’s conglomeration.
What distinguished the successful species from those that perished? According to Darwin, it was the incredibly slow process of gene by gene adaptation. Humans, who like to consider themselves the products of millions of years of natural selection and adaptation may be reluctant to relinquish the idea that evolution is simply the replacement of inferior traits by superior ones. We like to assume that evolution has worked for no other reason than to produce us. Gould sees little order or logic to evolution. He asserts that evolution may not be a question of survival of the fittest, but survival of the luckiest. He says that often the painstaking progress of evolution has been instantaneously altered by a completely random event such as a meteorite. One such event could have been responsible for wiping out 96% of the species on earth. “When the plan changes so abruptly, no animal, no matter how adapted to its normal environment, is better suited than any other to withstand such a catastrophe. Often it comes down to being in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Gould says that our presence here is merely a series of gratuitous accidents. He was led to this conclusion because recently scientists have come up with so many evolutionary dead ends in the shale; they simply could not explain them. There doesn’t seem to be any reason why the species that lost, lost. Leading to the conclusion that it was a calamity on a grand scale, Gould claims that if we could restage the events of 530 million years we would get an entirely different evolutionary result every time. His theory is very much like the emerging science of chaos, where one small, random perturbation can have tremendous repercussions in time, space and eternity.
It boggles the mind to think that if any of these creatures had survived this cataclysm, won out over homo-sapiens and evolved into sentient beings, how different the earth would have been from what it is now. It also makes you wonder about what this evolutionary crap shoot might have turned up on other planets.
In The URANTIA Book, a Life-Carrier says:
“It will hardly be possible to explain to the present-day human mind many of the queer and apparently grotesque occurrences of early evolutionary progress. A purposeful plan was functioning throughout all of these seemingly strange evolution of living things, but we are not allowed arbitrarily to interfere with the development of the life patterns after they have once been set in operation.” (UB 65:3.1)
It also states that the eastern and central implantation groups were initially developing human potentialities, but the region suffered irretrievable losses of the highest types of germ plasm so the higher mammals subsequently developed from the western implantation of life. These and many other statements seem to confirm that Gould’s model of survival of the luckiest is, at least to some extent, in harmony with The URANTIA Book’s account of how life evolved on earth.
Cindy Hopper
Toronto, Canada