ABSTRACT
This chapter reveals the details of how this sea-change of knowledge ultimately came to pass. Prior to Bill’s arrival at Harvard, his mentor, Elso Barghoorn, had experienced a very tough previous ten years. When Bill entered the scene, the landscape changed as their new findings came to the fore. Professor Barghoorn became universally acclaimed as the science he and his college Stanley Tyler and Bill produced showed – once and for all – the solution to the century-long conundrum posed by Darwin’s “missing” fossil record of Precambrian life. Notably, however, the impetus for the publication of the seminal Barghoorn-Tyler breakthrough paper, the initial manuscript having been prepared by Tyler some eight years earlier, came from Barghoorn’s fear of being very nearly scooped by his prime competitor, Preston Cloud. Given this emergency, Bill helped his professor overcome this unwelcome development. Bill’s graduate-school days were highly productive, but when the opportunity arose for him to strike out on his own, he joined the faculty at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), where he has prospered for the past 50 years.
