Which version of the origin of species?

[Anomalocaris]

I would recommend Stephen Jay Goulds Wonderful Life and Richard Dawkins Greatest Show on Earth

Gould's Wonderful Life is a great example of a well crafted popular science book with a lot of literary merit. It is truly a delight to read. Unfortunately much of the evidences Gould presented for his his view regarding the Cambrian explosion and the rise of complex animal life on earth has been severely challenged. His theory that higher animal life evolved in one huge big bang at the beginning of the cambrian and arrived at the scene in far greater variety of body plans than has survived to this day is no longer generally accepted. Many apparently weird Cambrian animals which Gould deemed to be unclassifiable into existent modern phylums, and therefore represent failed great experiments at the beginning of the evolution of modern complex animals, has been shown by later analysis and discovery to in fact either belong to, or was closely related to existent modern phylums. Many of these strange animals Gould thought to have flash into existence at the beginning of the Cambrian and then died out at the end of Cambrian have one been shown by new fossil evidence to have roots much older than Cambrian, and lasted hundreds of million years after end of Cambrian.

Gould's underlying thesis, that outcomes of evolution is chaotic and unpredictable, that whole phylums of animals arise and then die out for the tinest causes that are virtually impossible to reconstruct with confidence later, has not endured the test of later fossil discovery and improved analysis. Evolution is not like the film "Wonderful Life". If you rewind evolutionary history to a certain point in the past and then let it run forward again, what you get will not be utterly different from what came around the first time, as Gould suggested.

If you are inclined to dig, you might do some research on the hero of Gould's book, the British paleonotologist Simon Conway Morris. It was Morris who first demolished the long standing view championed by the great paleonotogist Charles Walcott of early 20th century, that the Cambrian fauna fits very neatly into modern classes of complex animals. Morris and Gould showed many of the Cambrian specimens do not fit neatly into modern classification as was then known. But from here they diverged. Gould believed many Cambrian forms are fundamentally different from modern forms, and their existence demonstrates the genetically driven, chaotic and divergent nature of evolutionary outcomes. Morris believed that evolution tended to provide convergent outcomes. Morris launched a broadside against Wonderful Life with his own book, the Crucible of Creation, in which he outlined objections to Gould's interpretation. Although Gould's sketch of Morris was extremely favorable, Morris' protrail of Gould's views was startlingly scathing.

It so happens that Morris is a devout Christian and a creationist, as well as a evolutionary paleonotologist. But that didn't stop him from letting evidence guide him where they are avilable, and doing outstanding work that earned him a fellowship in the Royal Society. But where there is no evidence, or scant evidence, he resorts to his god of gaps and preached the guiding hand. This led him to make some controversial remarks in science outreach programs. A rebuttal of the great paleonotologist's god of the gaps is offered by Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True.