the expectant hush before the performance

This certainly seems to be an ancestorist point of view. They weren't forced to submit to a lifestyle involving a very different view of their relationship with their world, if they wanted to be able to move about?

Spending all your time working may earn you a lot of money at the cost of your health.

To make unputdownable an intricate, technical account of the anatomies of worms, and other inconspicuous denizens of a half-billion-year-old sea, is a literary tour-de-force. But the theory that [Stephen Jay] Gould wrings out of his fossils is a sorry mess.