Book Review

SURVIVAL OF THE LUCKIEST

James Gleick, the author of ''Chaos: Making a New Science,'' is writing a biography of the physicist Richard, Feynman., JAMES GLEICK

1989

Overview

Marrella, a delicate animal nicknamed lace crab, the most prevalent of the Burgess creatures, looked to [Charles Doolittle Walcott], for want of anything better, like a trilobite. It isn't - it's something new. Opabinia, a much rarer animal, looked to Walcott like a fairly ordinary two-eyed sort of worm, at any rate some primitive member of the arthropod phylum. Mr. [Harry Whittington] realized that it did not belong with the arthropods or with any other modern classification. It had not two but five eyes, four of them on a pair of stalks. It had a protruding frontal nozzle that may have functioned like a vacuum cleaner. And so on - to even eerier creatures, like the whimsically named Hallucigenia and Sanctacaris (Santa Claws), some found by Mr. [Simon Conway Morris] when he embarked on a new program of ''fieldwork'' in the drawers and cabinets of the Smithsonian in Washington. ''Wonderful Life'' is richly illustrated with drawings of these and many other animals. ''The history of life is a story of massive removal followed by differentiation within a few surviving stocks,'' Mr. Gould concludes, ''not the conventional tale of steadily increasing excellence, complexity, and diversity.'' Furthermore, he argues that the vanished body plans seem, functionally speaking, every bit as ''fit'' as the survivors. Chance must have played a central role in choosing the victims of this decimation. ''Darwinian history of life held that there was progress in evolution,'' he said in a telephone interview from Beaumont, Tex. ''What the re-examination of the Burgess Shale tells us is that there isn't any progress at all and that human evolution is highly improbable. If you could, like Marty McFly in the movie 'Back to the Future,' go back in time and visit the Burgess Shale in the Cambrian period, and then replay history, odds are that we humans wouldn't exist at all. We are just one of an infinite number of possibilities.'' Mr. Gould, who teaches biology, geology and the history of science at Harvard University, is at work on a book on the structure of evolutionary theory. ''That work,'' he said, unlike ''Wonderful Life,'' ''is technical and for specialists.'' MAX BERLEY NOBODY WOULD LISTEN

• Publisher: New York Times Company
• Subject: Briggs, Derek / GLEICK, JAMES / Gould, Stephen Jay / Morris, Simon Conway / Walcott, Charles Doolittle / Whittington, Harry