On embroyos and ancestors: Fossils of tiny embryos 570 million years old may well be the greatest paleontological discovery of our time

Natural History, July-August, 1998 by Stephen Jay Gould

Fossils of tiny embryos 570 million years old may well be Greatest paleontological discovery of our time.

"Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better." I had always regarded this famous phrase as a primary example of the intellectual vacuity that often passes for profundity in our current era of laid-back, New Age bliss--a verbal counterpart to the vapidity of the "have a nice day" smiley face. But when I saw this phrase chiseled in stone on the pediment of a French hospital built in the early years of our century, I knew that I must have missed a longer and more interesting pedigree. This formula for well-being, I then discovered, had been devised in 1920 by Emile Coue (1857-1926), a French pharmacist who made quite a stir in the pop-psych circles of his day with a theory of self-improvement through autosuggestion based on frequent repetition of this mantra--a treatment that received the name of Coueism. (In a rare example of improvement in translation, this phrase gains both a rhyme and better flow, at least to my ears, when converted to English from Coue's French original: Tous les jours, a tous points de rue, je vais de mieux en mieux.)

I don't doubt the efficacy of Coue's mantra, for the placebo effect (its only possible mode of action) should not be dismissed as a delusion but cherished as a useful strategy for certain forms of healing--a primary example of the influence that mental attitudes can wield upon our physical sense of well-being. However, as a general description for the usual style and pacing of human improvement, the constant and steady incrementalism of Coue's motto--a twentieth-century version of an ancient claim embodied in the victory cry of Aesop's tortoise, "slow and steady wins the race"--strikes me as only rarely applicable, and surely secondary, to the usual mode of human enlightenment, either attitudinal or intellectual: that is, not by global creep forward, inch by subsequent inch, but rather in rushes or whooshes, usually following the removal of some impediment or the discovery of some facilitating device, either ideological or technological.

The glory of science lies in such innovatory bursts. Centuries of vain speculation dissolved in months before the resolving power of Galileo's telescope, trained upon the full range of cosmic distances, from the Moon to the Milky Way. About 350 years later, centuries of conjecture and indirect data about the composition of lunar rocks melted before a few pounds of actual samples brought back by Apollo 11 after Mr. Armstrong's small step onto a new world.

In the physical sciences, such explosions of discovery usually follow the invention of a device that can, for the first time, penetrate a previously invisible realm--the "too far" by the telescope, the "too small" by the microscope, the imperceptible by X rays, or the unreachable by spaceships. In the humbler world of natural history, episodes of equal pith and moment often follow a "eureka" triggered by continually available mental, rather than expensively novel physical, equipment. In other words, great discovery often requires a map to a hidden mine filled with gems then easily gathered by conventional tools, not a shiny new space-age machine for penetrating previously (and utterly) inaccessible worlds.

The uncovering of life's early history has featured several such cascades of discovery following a key insight about proper places to look, and I introduce this year's wonderful story by citing a previous episode of remarkably similar character from the last generation of our science (literally so, for this year's discoverer wrote his Ph.D. dissertation under the guidance of one of the earlier two innovators).

When, as a boy in the early 1950s, I first became fascinated with paleontology and evolution, the standard dogma proclaimed the origin of life was inherently improbable but achieved on this planet only because the immensity of geological time must convert the nearly impossible into the virtually certain. (With no limit on the number of tries, you will eventually flip fifty heads in a row with an honest coin.) As evidence for asserting the exquisite specialness of life in the face of overwhelmingly contrary odds, these conventional sources cited the absence of any fossils representing the first half of the earth's existence--a span of more than 2 billion years, often formally designated on geological charts as the Azoic (literally, "lifeless") era. Although scientists do recognize the limitations of such negative evidence (the first example of a previously absent phenomenon may, after all, turn up tomorrow), this failure to find any fossils for geology's first 2 billion years did seem fairly persuasive. Paleontologists had been searching assiduously for more than a century and had found nothing but ambiguous scraps and blobs. Negative results based on such sustained effort over so many years do begin to inspire belief.

But the impasse broke in the 1950s, when Elso Barghoorn and Stanley Tyler reported fossils of unicellular life in rocks more than 2 billion years old. Pale ontologists, to summarize a long and complex story with many exciting turns and notable heroes, had been looking in the wrong place--in conventional sediments that rarely preserve the remains of single-celled bacterial organisms without hard parts. They had not realized that life had remained so simple for so long, or that the ordinary sites for good fossil records could not preserve such organisms.