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I’m not going to try a abstract of the week’s actions right here. That was the unenviable activity given to Roberta Millstein, and maybe a future edited quantity will comprise a refined model of her remarks. There’s one activity I can’t sidestep nonetheless. Historic contingency. Now what precisely is that? If I let you know that we did not resolve the difficulty over every week of dialogue, you’ll hardly fall out of your chair. Nonetheless, it’s value lingering on the query for a second.
To say that one thing—an occasion or end result—is traditionally contingent is to say, not less than, that it may have been in any other case. It may have been the case that no roads in Woods Gap have been named for Chicago biologists. Or that no such place as Woods Gap ever existed. (Think about if the Laurentide Ice Sheet had not reached modern-day Massachusetts. Then there can be no such factor as Cape Cod, and no Woods Gap both.) One thing that would not have been in any other case shouldn’t be contingent, it’s needed. It’s true in all potential worlds, in the event you’re into that kind of factor.* A contingent end result is true in solely some potential worlds. I’m being a bit sloppy right here, however the fundamental level must be clear. Contingent outcomes are distinct from needed ones. That is what we would name a “minimal sense” of contingency.
[* Actually, the things that are supposed to be true in all possible world are necessary truths: truths of logic, say. In discussions of contingency in evolution, the sense of necessity in view is different. It refers to “physical necessity,” or something like that: the kind of necessity underwritten by laws of nature. Something that is physically necessary in our world will not be physically necessary in all possible worlds—it will only be necessary in those worlds whose laws of nature resemble our own.]
Minimal contingency is all effectively and good. However particularly in discussions of contingency in evolution, the time period “contingency” carries an whiff of improbability. It’s not simply pointless that there are two streets in Woods Gap named after Chicago biologists. Additionally it is unlikely, contingent on a slew of historic particulars lining up good. Had one or a couple of of those particulars been misaligned, then the end result would have did not acquire and one other, fairly totally different one would have taken its place. To label an end result “contingent,” then, is to attract consideration to the sequence of distinctive occasions (or “contingencies”) required to deliver it about—it’s not simply to flag that it may have been in any other case.
Discussions of contingency within the life sciences are most likely as outdated as biology itself, however relating to discussions of contingency per se, an vital touchstone is Great Life. That is the guide that Stephen Jay Gould printed in 1989. It’s maybe greatest remembered for popularizing the expression “replaying life’s tape,” which additionally provided the identify for our seminar. The related thought experiment runs as follows. Think about you’ll be able to “rewind the tape of life” and play it once more from scratch. Throughout this “replay,” the historical past of life as you recognize it is going to be erased and written over with one thing new. However what precisely? How intently will this new historical past of life resemble the outdated one, each in its broad contours and its intimate particulars? And—since one element pursuits us most of all—how doubtless is it that human-like intelligence will evolve anew? Gould’s reply to the final query is, “not very.” The truth is, “any replay of the tape [will] lead evolution down a pathway radically totally different from the street truly taken.” Evolution is a historic course of, and the “essence of historical past” is contingency. This means that human intelligence is a cosmic accident that nearly definitely wouldn’t reappear if the historical past of life might be run again to the start and allowed to unfold once more underneath the identical or related situations.
There are numerous difficulties concerned in deciphering what Gould is as much as. I’m not going to rehearse these right here (for these within the particulars, I like to recommend that you simply take a look at John Beatty’s put up from 2017, which I not too long ago re-posted in honor of the seminar). As an alternative, I need to contemplate a problem that didn’t come up throughout our discussions at MBL. That’s: simply how efficient is Gould’s argument, anyway? By this I don’t imply how efficient is it scientifically. Gould’s argument is a scientific argument—it’s an argument that the historical past of life would unfold very in another way if the “tape of life” might be run once more from the Cambrian radiation. (The entire thing is strung along with gossamer threads of instinct, however that isn’t my current concern.) No, what I’m keen on is how efficient the argument is as a broadside in opposition to anthropocentrism—the view that people are crucial issues on the earth.
As Derek Turner prompt on the seminar, a central intention of the “replay experiment” is to undermine anthropocentrism by severing its connections with evolutionary principle. Gould takes it to be a comforting thought that people are the inevitable results of a progressive evolutionary course of—a course of that, left to its personal units, was certain to provide one thing like a human thoughts. The replay experiment seeks to problematize this notion by exhibiting that people are completely unintended. Take one unsuitable activate the evolutionary path resulting in people and bam!—not solely are people erased from the next historical past of life, however so is one of the best likelihood of manufacturing something resembling a human thoughts. (Gould actually thinks this. The final pages of Great Life stroll readers by way of a sequence of counterfactual situations. What if the eukaryotic cell hadn’t come collectively? What if the Ediacaran biota hadn’t gone extinct? What if a unique set of anatomical designs had swum by way of to the Ordovician Interval? And so on. At every check-point, the unrealized chance erases people—and I collect, something resembling a human thoughts—from the next historical past of life.)
All this has the specified impact of creating human minds appear removed from inevitable, and certainly next-to-miraculous. However isn’t this maybe a little bit of an issue? Perhaps Gould is true that some individuals take solace in the concept human minds emerged inevitably from a progressive evolutionary course of. I can think about a liberal theologian from the early a part of the 20th century taking this view. (Why did God arrange the universe in the way in which He did? As a result of He knew it was certain to provide human-like minds in nice abundance.) Nonetheless, I submit that what’s extra conducive to human vanity is the notion that people are simply additional particular issues. Maybe we’re unbelievable—okay, wonderful—but when the reason being that one thing so totally distinctive is difficult to drag off, then human vanity escapes unscathed. Ask your self, which of those is extra damaging to anthropocentrism: the notion that we’re unbelievable as a result of our defining characteristic is extremely tough to evolve, or the notion that we’re abnormal merchandise of evolution, brainy however not miraculous? Gould opts for Door A, and, I believe, stubs his toe on the way in which by way of.
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