The Abrahamic traditions regard God as the world’s author. But what kind of author? A novelist? A playwright? Perhaps a composer of classical music? I will argue that it is best to regard God as like an improvisational play director or the leader of a jazz ensemble. Each determines the broad melodic contours or coarse-grained plot beforehand, while allowing their musicians or actors, and chance, to fill in the more fine-grained details. This analogy allows us to regard God as the (...) ultimate author of this world, while allowing us to be, while less than co-authors, more than mere enactors of a pre-written piece. These metaphors are particularly well-suited to illustrate and flesh out an Open Theistic view of things. (shrink)

This article offers a fresh assessment of the views of the American paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould on the relation of science and religion. Gould is best known for his celebrated notion of “nonoverlapping magisteria,” which is often seen in somewhat negative terms as inhibiting dialogue. However, as a result of his critique of the unificationist approach to knowledge developed in Edward O. Wilson's Consilience, Gould later made increased use of the more positive notion of a “consilience of (...) equal regard,” which recognized the porous nature of disciplinary divides and the propriety of interdisciplinary dialogue. Gould's final views on the relation of science and religion, set out in The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox, published after his death, affirms the distinctiveness and autonomy of science and religion on the one hand, while encouraging their constructive dialogue and productive interaction on the other. This should now be seen as Gould's definitive statement on this question. (shrink)

Stephen Jay Gould argued that replaying the ‘tape of life’ would result in radically different evolutionary outcomes. Recently, biologists and philosophers of science have paid increasing attention to the theoretical importance of convergent evolution—the independent origination of similar biological forms and functions—which many interpret as evidence against Gould’s thesis. In this paper, we examine the evidentiary relevance of convergent evolution for the radical contingency debate. We show that under the right conditions, episodes of convergent evolution can constitute valid natural experiments (...) that support inferences regarding the deep counterfactual stability of macroevolutionary outcomes. However, we argue that proponents of convergence have problematically lumped causally heterogeneous phenomena into a single evidentiary basket, in effect treating all convergent events as if they are of equivalent theoretical import. As a result, the ‘critique from convergent evolution’ fails to engage with key claims of the radical contingency thesis. To remedy this, we develop ways to break down the heterogeneous set of convergent events based on the nature of the generalizations they support. Adopting this more nuanced approach to convergent evolution allows us to differentiate iterated evolutionary outcomes that are probably common among alternative evolutionary histories and subject to law-like generalizations, from those that do little to undermine and may even support, the Gouldian view of life. (shrink)

Much philosophical progress has been made in elucidating the idea of evolutionary contingency in a recent re-burgeoning of the debate. However, additional progress has been impaired on three fronts. The first relates to its characterisation: the under-specification of various contingency claims has made it difficult to conceptually pinpoint the scope to which ‘contingency’ allegedly extends, as well as which biological forms are in contention. That is—there appears to be no systematic means with which to fully specify contingency claims which has (...) led to a tendency for authors to talk past each other. Secondly, on the matter of evidence, recent research has focused on the evidential import of convergent evolution which is taken to disconfirm the evolutionary contingency thesis. However, there has been a neglect of convergent evolution’s converse: ‘evolutionary idiosyncrasies’ or the singular evolution of certain forms, which I argue is evidentially supportive of evolutionary contingency. Thirdly, evolutionary contingency has often been claimed to vary in degrees and that the debate, itself, is a matter of ‘relative significance’. However, there has been no formal method of evaluating the strength of contingency and its relative significance in a particular domain. In this paper, I address all three issues by proposing a systematic means of fully specifying contingency theses with the concept of the modal range. Secondly, I propose an account of evolutionary idiosyncrasies, investigate the explanations for their occurrences, and, subsequently, spell out their significance with respect to the evolutionary contingency thesis. Finally, having been equipped with the evidential counterpart to convergent evolution, I shall sketch a likelihood framework for evaluating, precisely on the basis of a sequence of opposing data, the strength and relative significance of evolutionary contingency in a particular domain. With this in hand, the relative observations of idiosyncrasies and convergences can be informative of the strength and relative significance of contingency in any particular domain. (shrink)

This paper offers a paleobiological perspective on the debate concerning the possible use of biotechnology to bring back extinct species. One lesson from paleobiology is that extinction selectivity matters in addition to extinction rates and extinction magnitude. Combining some of Darwin’s insights about artificial selection with the theory of species selection that paleobiologists developed in the 1970s and 1980s provides a useful context for thinking about de-extinction. Using recent work on the prioritization of candidate species for de-extinction as a test (...) case, the paper argues that de-extinction would be a form of artificial species selection in which humans influence which species persist vs. go extinct. This points to a serious gap in our ethical theory: Much work has been done to clarify the value of biological diversity, but we also need theoretical guidance for decisions that amount to species sorting, and that will shape the macroevolutionary future. (shrink)

The epistemology of studies addressing questions about historical and prehistorical phenomena is a subject of increasing discussion among philosophers of science. A related field of inquiry that has yet to be connected to this topic is the epistemology of climate science. Branching these areas of research, I show how variety-of-evidence reasoning accounts for scientific inferences about the past by detailing a case study in paleoclimate reconstruction. This analysis aims to clarify the logic of historical inquiry in general and, by focusing (...) on a case study about climate change, it offers an epistemic account of a particular discipline that is of environmental and social importance. (shrink)

The Gouldian argument for evolutionary contingency found in Wonderful Life can be dissected into three premises: palaeontological, macro-evolutionary, and developmental. Discussions of evolutionary contingency have revolved primarily around the developmental. However, a shift in methodological practice and new palaeontological evidence subsequent to the book’s publication appears to threaten the palaeontological premise that asserts high Cambrian disparity, or, roughly, that morphological differences between the Cambrian species were high. This presents a prima facie problem: Did the Cambrian consist of enough anatomical variety (...) to fuel a different outcome upon a replay of the tape of life? I investigate the role that disparity plays in the Gouldian argument for evolutionary contingency and conclude that the reduced disparity view does not undermine the argument, per se. As for the macro-evolutionary premise, Gould never offers any explicit justification for the idea that species sorting was indiscriminate or ‘lottery-like’ (though he certainly gestures at it). Putting aside the exegetical, I consider certain empirical avenues for underwriting the macro-evolutionary premise and argue that the most plausible route is to appeal to the special status of mass extinctions, a move that is not entirely unfamiliar to macro-evolutionists. That is, mass extinctions can be good sources of contingency due to their being ‘chancy’ in at least three respects. In sum, I update the palaeontological and macro-evolutionary premises as to reconstrue the Gouldian argument for evolutionary contingency in its strongest form. (shrink)

V nasledujúcom príspevku sa snažíme zdôvodniť vyčlenenie troch typov procesov v pozorovanom vesmíre - procesov slabo, stredne a silne usmernených, a to na základe rôznej miery autonómnosti ich štruktúrnych prvkov a rôznej miery či intenzity zákonov, ktorými sú usmerňované alebo riadené. Individuálne a konkrétne procesy sú tak v podstate totožné s individuálnymi a konkrétnymi systémami, cez ktoré, v ktorých a prostredníctvom ktorých sa úplne realizujú, disponujúc tak vždy a všade vlastným substanciálnym obsahom. Na tomto základe potom vyčleňujeme slabo usmernené procesy (...) v neživej prírode s málo vyčlenenými alebo autonómnymi štruktúrnymi prvkami, stredne usmernené procesy živej prírody s oveľa väčšími, vyčlenenejšími a autonómnejšími štruktúrnymi prvkami vo forme živých buniek a postupne rastúcich a zdokonaľujúcich sa organizmov a tried organizmov a nakoniec silne usmernené procesy tzv. sociálnej prírody alebo ľudskej spoločnosti, pozostávajúcej z ľudí ako svojich základných alebo štruktúrnych prvkov a tiež z nimi generovaného technického a/lebo civilizačného "obalu", ktoré sú podobne ako živé procesy a systémy usmerňované a riadené čoraz väčším počtom pre nich špecifických vedeckých zákonov, princípov alebo "pravidiel". (shrink)

Contingency-theorists have gestured to a series of phenomena such as random mutations or rare Armageddon-like events as that which accounts for evolutionary contingency. These phenomena constitute a class, which may be aptly called the ‘sources of contingency’. In this paper, I offer a probabilistic conception of what it is to be a source of contingency and then examine two major candidates: chance variation and genetic drift, both of which have historically been taken to be ‘chancy’ in a number of different (...) senses. However,contrathe gesturing of contingency-theorists, chance variation and genetic drift are not always strong sources of contingency, as they can be non-chancy in at least one sense that opposes evolutionary contingency. The probabilistic conception offered herein allows for sources of contingency to appropriately vary in strength. To this end, I import Shannon’sinformation entropyas a statistical measure for systematically assessing the strength of a source of contingency, which is part and parcel of identifying sources of contingency. In brief, the higher the entropy, the greater the strength. This is also empirically significant because molecular, mutational, and replicative studies often contain sufficient frequency or probability data to allow for entropies to be calculated. In this way, contingency-theorists can evaluate the strength of a source of contingency in real-world cases. Moreover, the probabilistic conception also makes conceptual room for the converse of sources of contingency: ‘sources of directionality’, which ought to be recognised, as they can interact with genuine sources of contingency in undermining evolutionary contingency. (shrink)

The contingency of biological regularities—and its implications for the existence of biological laws—has long puzzled biologists and philosophers. The best argument for the contingency of biological regularities is John Beatty’s evolutionary contingency thesis, which will be re-analyzed here. First, I argue that in Beatty’s thesis there are two versions of strong contingency used as arguments against biological laws that have gone unnoticed by his commentators. Second, Beatty’s two different versions of strong contingency are analyzed in terms of two different stabilities (...) of regularities. Third, I argue that Beatty and his commentators have focused on the more ineffective trajectory stability version of the argument, whereas the constancy stability version provides a more substantial and applicable argument against the existence of biological laws. Fourth, I develop a counterexample to Beatty’s thesis. Finally, I discuss the possibility of evolution producing repeatable and general non-lawlike regularities and patterns by utilizing the notion of generative entrenchment and by criticizing the thesis of multiple realizability of biological properties. (shrink)

The distinction between idiographic science, which aims to reconstruct sequences of particular events, and nomothetic science, which aims to discover laws and regularities, is crucial for understanding the paleobiological revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. Stephen Jay Gould at times seemed conflicted about whether to say (a) that idiographic science is fine as it is or (b) that paleontology would have more credibility if it were more nomothetic. Ironically, one of the lasting results of the paleobiological revolution was a new (...) way of doing historical science that defies categorization as idiographic or nomothetic. Yet the tension between (a) and (b) persists in some recent work in the philosophy of science, with Carol Cleland defending a version of (a) and Dan McShea and Robert Brandon defending a version of (b). In placing Cleland's work into conversation with that of McShea and Brandon, this paper defends a third (c) synthetic approach that emphasizes the blending of idiographic and nomothetic work. (shrink)

In the wake of recent attempts at alternate history (Bowler 2013), this paper suggests several avenues for a pluralistic approach to Charles Darwin and his role in the history of evolutionary theory. We examine in what sense Darwin could be described as a major driver of theoretical change in the history of biology. First, this paper examines how Darwin influenced the future of biological science: not merely by stating the fact of evolution or by bringing evidence for it; but by (...) discovering natural selection, and giving it pre-eminence over any other mechanism for evolution; and also by proposing a masterful and quite unique synthesis of many scientific fields. Contrasting Darwin’s views with those of A.R. Wallace, I conclude that “natural selection” is clearly an original contribution, that it had no forerunners or co-discoverers, and could barely have appeared after Darwin conceived of it. This specificity of Darwin’s contribution is an invitation to be strongly presentist (Loison 2016) and to adopt only weak counter-factuals. In contrast, there are possible ways to use strong counter-factuals as attempts to “pluralize” the history of biological theory: i.e. imagine new possible avenues for the development of evolutionary biology. The idea that evolution was a theory “in the air” suggests that evolutionary theory could have developed in a world without Darwin, especially if we accept to delete not only “Darwin” but “England”. France and Germany are examined as possible countries where evolutionary ideas would have thrived even with no contribution from the English scientists. Finally, the paper suggests another counter-factual hypothesis: deleting not Darwin and his Origin but the Darwin Industry itself. This may allow us to read the Origin of Species with fresh eyes and to discover Darwin’s life-long interest in variation and its laws, as many of his early readers did. (shrink)

‘Gouldian arguments’ appeal to the contingency of a scientific domain to establish that domain’s autonomy from some body of theory. For instance, pointing to evolutionary contingency, Stephen Jay Gould suggested that natural selection alone is insufficient to explain life on the macroevolutionary scale. In analysing contingency, philosophers have provided source-independent accounts, understanding how events and processes structure history without attending to the nature of those events and processes. But Gouldian Arguments require source-dependent notions of contingency. An account of contingency is (...) source-dependent when it is indexed to some pattern and some process. Positions like Gould’s do not turn on the mere fact of life’s contingency—that life’s shape could have been different due to its sensitivity to initial conditions, path-dependence or stochasticity. Rather, Gouldian arguments require that the contingency is due to particular kinds of processes: in this case, those which microevolutionary theory cannot account for. This source-dependent perspective clarifies both debates about the nature and importance of contingency, and empirical routes for testing Gould’s thesis. (shrink)

What is the relationship between evolutionary contingency and diversity? The evolutionary contingency thesis emphasizes dependency relations and chance as the hallmarks of evolution. While contingency can be destructive of, for example, the fragile and complex dynamics in an ecosystem, I will mainly focus on the productive or causal aspect of contingency for a particular sort of diversity. There are many sorts of diversities: Gould is most famous for his diversity-to-decimation model, which includes disparate body plans distinguishing different phyla. However, structural (...) diversity construed more broadly spans scales, such as organization in and among cells, structural arrangements and biomechanics on various scales, and even the profile of ancestor-descendent relationships or community structure of interactions within ecosystems. By focusing on stochastic processes in contingent evolution, I argue that contingency causes structural diversity. Specifically, I focus on the plurality of structural types of cells, genetic codes, and phyla diversity as case studies. (shrink)