"From the first there were a number of scientists who doubted the account that Steve Gould had presented, however much they admired the manner of its delivery," Fortey wrote in Life. That is putting it mildly. If only Stephen Gould could think as clearly as he writes! barked the Oxford academic Richard Dawkins in the opening line of a review (in the London Sunday Telegraph) of Wonderful Life. Dawkins acknowledged that the book was "unputdownable" and a "literary tour-de-force," but accused Gould of engaging in a "grandiloquent and near-disingenuous" misrepresentation of the facts by suggesting that the Burgess revisions had stunned the paleontological community. "The view that he is attacking—that evolution marches inexorably toward a pinnacle such as man—has not been believed for 50 years," Dawkins fumed.

And yet that was exactly the conclusion to which many general reviewers were drawn. One, writing in the New York Times Book Re^vie^, cheerfully suggested that as a result of Gould's book scientists "have been throwing out some preconceptions that they had not examined for generations. They are, reluctantly or enthusiastically, accepting the idea that humans are as much an accident of nature as a product of orderly development."