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Jun
26
Walcott’s Quarry #63: The Argument
Filed Under Walcott's Quarry
Stephen Jay Gould was famous for championing the diversity of the Burgess shale, even up to the Phylum level, and calling anything else shoehorning. But how far was he willing to take it?
I can see why Walcott won that argument. Sure, the organisms of the Cambrian may have been diverse down to the phyla, but if Walcott and his little buddy next to him were the same species of trilobite, then they would be the same taxa, namely genus, species, phyla, kingdom, domain, etc.
Although….I don’t know the full extent of that argument and I don’t really know much about Cambrian fauna, I really can’t say that I get the joke there. Mind filling me in?
In his book Wonderful Life, SJ Gould argued that a lot of the Burgess Shale fossils represented new phyla, a lot more than is now commonly recognized.
I was just taking Gould’s real-life argument to a ridiculous extreme.
I can see that…lol.