Subject: Glorious Contingency 2Chapter 10 from "How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of
Science": Glorious Contingency: Gould's Dangerous Idea and the Search
for Meaning in an Age of Science
"Through no fault of our own, and by dint of no cosmic plan or
conscious purpose, we have become, by the grace of a glorious
evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's
continuity on earth. We have not asked for that role, but we cannot
abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are." - Stephen
Jay Gould, A Glorious Accident, 1997
In one of his final public addresses before his death, recorded live
at the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the United Nations in
the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, the astronomer
Carl Sagan waxed poetic about our place in the universe and its
profound implication for the relationship of science and religion:
"One of science's alleged crimes is revealing that our favorite, most
reassuring stories about our place in the universe and how we came to
be are delusional. Instead, what science reveals is a universe much
older and much vaster than the tidy, anthropocentric proscenium of
our ancestors. We have found from modern astronomy that we live on a
tiny hunk of rock and metal third from the sun, that circles a
humdrum star in the obscure outskirts of an ordinary galaxy, which
contains some four hundred billion other stars, which is one of about
a hundred billion other galaxies that make up the universe, and
according to some current views, a universe that is one among an
immense number, perhaps an infinite number, of other universes. In
this perspective the idea that our planet is at the center of the
universe, much less that human purpose is central to the existence of
the universe, is pathetic" (Carl Sagan).
In his 1977 book, The First Three Minutes (of the universe), the
physicist Steven Weinberg speculated on the human need for
centrality, but was even more direct in his assessment of where we
actually fit in the cosmic scheme of things:
"It is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some
special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a
more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back
to the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from
the beginning. It is even harder to realize that this present
universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition,
and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat.
The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems
pointless" (Weinberg).
Was our existence foreordained from the beginning, or are we nothing
more than a "farce," a fluke product of a "chain of accidents"?
Modern astronomers and physicists may be the theologians of science,
but these questions date back at least to the ancient Greek
historians and philosophers who, twenty-five hundred years ago,
identified a central tension in the nature of change, as to what must
be versus what may be, that which happens necessarily versus what
happens contingently. Is our existence a necessity, that is, are
things such that it could not have been otherwise? Or is our
existence a contingency, something that need not have been? What
Sagan and Weinberg argue is the latter, our existence was contingent
and by no means did it have to be. Of course, this contradicts the
belief of all the world's religions, which hold that we are a
necessary outcome of God's omnipotence and beneficence. But must we
choose between contingency and necessity? Is there not an interactive
middle ground that more adequately describes the history of the
universe, the world, and life? There is.
One of the most common reasons people give for believing in God is
that the universe, the world, and life appears to be designed, in
other words, it looks necessary, not contingent. If the universe, the
world, and life were not necessary, however, it would imply that
there is no designer. And without a designer there is no necessary
meaning to life other than what we humans impose upon it. If life is
contingent, then we might not have been: rewind the tape of life and
play it again and we would not be here. This is what makes
contingency such a "dangerous" idea. Most people find the prospects
of this world-view existentially devastating. In fact, contingency
can be both liberating and empowering.
If The Tape Were Played Twice
I first discovered the notion of contingency in 1987 when I entered a
doctoral program in history at Claremont Graduate School. In
preparation for a course in the philosophy of history, I turned to
the Syntopicon (109 "great ideas") of the Great Books of the Western
World and read what the great minds of history said about fate and
chance, universal and particular, and especially necessity and
contingency. Here were the grand and timeless debates about history
and the nature of change. To my surprise and disappointment, however,
not only did we not discuss what these great minds said about these
great ideas, we did not even study these great ideas. Instead we
explored the possibility that it was not possible to know any ideas,
or understand any authors, great or not. Later I realized I was
caught squarely in the middle of the postmodern, deconstructionist
movement. I abandoned hope for the future of the philosophy of
history.
Two years later, however, my flame of optimism was rekindled by the
publication of a book that would help launch a resurgence in thinking
about the nature of history. But it was not written by a historian.
It was written by a paleontologist. Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful
Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (1989a), has become
something of a watershed for those who study contingency and
complexity, especially applied to organisms, societies, and history,
and discussions of it can be found in many works. Walter Fontana and
Leo Buss (1994), for example, ask in the title of their chapter "What
Would be Conserved if 'The Tape Were Played Twice'?"
This is a direct reference to Gould's suggestion in Wonderful Life
that if the tape of life were rewound to the time of the organisms
found in the Canadian outcrop known as the Burgess Shale, dated to
about 530 million years ago, and replayed with a few contingencies
tweaked here and there, humans would most likely never have evolved.
So powerful are the effects of contingency that a small change in the
early stages of a sequence can produce large effects in the later
stages. Edward Lorenz (1979) calls this the butterfly effect and by
now the metaphor is well known: a butterfly flaps its wings in
Brazil, producing a storm in Texas. The uncertainty of our past and
unpredictability of our future created by contingency is what makes
this such a challenging idea to historians and scientists, whose
models and laws call for a search for unifying generalities, not
capricious happenstances.
Gould's dangerous idea, therefore, did not go unnoticed. Stuart
Kauffman, one of the pioneers of complexity in explaining the
self-organization of complex systems (1993), references Gould and
Wonderful Life and asks about the Cambrian explosion of life: "Was it
Darwinian chance and selection alone, or did principles of
self-organization mingle with chance and necessity?" (1995, 13).
Mathematicians Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart (1991) published a feature
story on "Chaos, Contingency, and Convergence" in Nonlinear Science
Today, centered around Wonderful Life. Wired magazine's Kevin Kelly
(1994) devotes several pages to Gould's contingency. Philosophers
also got in on the discussion. Murdo William McRae (1993) published a
critique entitled "Stephen Jay Gould and the Contingent Nature of
History." And, most exhaustively, Daniel Dennett (1995) devoted a
Brobdingnagian chapter in his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea to Gould
and this idea.
Most of these authors have criticisms of Gould's theory, and some are
valid. Fontana and Buss contend that plenty would be conserved if the
tape were rerun again. Kauffman argues for necessitating laws of
self-organization that defy contingency. Cohen and Stewart point out
(13): "Nowhere in Wonderful Life does Gould give an adequate
treatment of the possible existence of evolutionary mechanisms,
convergences, universal constants, that might constrain the effects
of contingency." Kelley has actually run Gould's thought experiment
in a sandbox with contrary results (410): "First thing you notice as
you repeat the experiment over and over again, as I have, is that the
landscape formations are a very limited subset of all possible
forms." McRae concludes (241): "Gould's argument for contingency
ultimately returns to the notions of progress and predictability it
set out to challenge." And Dennett calls Gould "the boy who cried
wolf," a "failed revolutionary," and "Refuter of Orthodox Darwinism."
The Mismeasure of Contingency
One of the surprising things about all of these criticisms is that
they appear to have missed or misunderstood the meaning of
contingency and what Gould believes is its relationship to
necessitating laws of nature. The reason for these misunderstandings
is twofold. The first is the problem of meaning, contingency does not
mean random, chance, or accident. The second is the problem of
emphasis, contingency does not exclude necessity. Identifying and
solving these problems can not only show us what is right about
Gould's idea, but also helps us understand how to find meaning in a
contingent universe.
1. The Problem of Meaning. Many of those who oppose the idea of a
predominantly contingent universe have misread contingency for
accidental or random. Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, for example, have
stated explicitly that, "The survivors, who produced us, did so by
contingency, by sheerest accident" (1991, 9); "Gould's argument that
contingency, randomness, plays a major role in the results of
evolution," and Gould "sees the evolution of humanity as being
accidental, purely contingent" (1994, 131-132). Yet Gould states
quite clearly in Wonderful Life (1989a, 283):
"I am not speaking of randomness (for E had to arise, as a
consequence of A through D), but of the central principle of all
history, contingency. A historical explanation does not rest on
direct deductions from laws of nature, but on an unpredictable
sequence of antecedent states, where any major change in any step of
the sequence would have altered the final result. This final result
is therefore dependent, or contingent, upon everything that came
before, the unerasable and determining signature of history."
As Gould notes, contingency is an unpredictable sequence of
antecedent states, not randomness, chanciness, or accident.
Daniel Dennett (1995) likewise takes Gould to task in a chapter
entitled "Tinker to Evers to Chance," a play on words linking Gould's
love of baseball, the three names represent the most famous
double-play combination in baseball history, to chance, which Dennett
identifies with contingency. But contingency does not mean chance,
nor does it mean random, despite Dennett's conclusion (306): "The
fact that the Burgess fauna were decimated in a mass extinction is in
any case less important to Gould than another conclusion he wants to
draw about their fate: their decimation, he claims, was random."
True, mass extinctions may seem random, as in where an asteroid hits
the Earth. But by contingency Gould means a conjuncture of preceding
states that determine subsequent outcomes. Just as astronomers knew
exactly when and where Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was going to strike
Jupiter in July of 1995 (and nailed the timing and location
precisely), astronomers from (say) Mars, observing Earth 65 million
years ago could have calculated the collision with the Yucatan
peninsula with pointpoint accuracy. But the effects of those impacts
could not have been adequately computed (and in the case of the
Jupiter hit were not), because of the number of contingencies
involved.
The eventual rise of Homo sapiens, is even more contingent with
millions of antecedent states in out past. Each event in the sequence
has a cause, and thus is determined, but the eventual outcome is
unpredictable because of contingency, not randomness or chance. The
Burgess extinction may have been determined, but the sequence of
events leading up to it, and those following, all the way to humans,
were contingent. On this point Dennett says he is confused about what
Gould means by "we" when he says we would not be here again if we
reran the tape (307):
"There is a sliding scale on which Gould neglects to locate his claim
about rewinding the tape. If by "us" he meant something very
particular, Steve Gould and Dan Dennett, let's say, then we wouldn't
need the hypothesis of mass extinction to persuade us how lucky we
are to be alive. If, at the other extreme, by "us" Gould meant
something very general, such as "air-breathing, land-inhabiting
vertebrates," he would probably be wrong."
Dennett's confusion seems, well, confusing. By "we" Gould means the
species Homo sapiens, no more, no less, and he has stated so on
numerous occasions, including in Wonderful Life (289): "Replay the
tape a million times from a Burgess beginning, and I doubt that
anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again."
One might claim that these misunderstandings are caused by the fact
that Gould has not offered a formal definition of contingency. That
is true, so one must read him broad and deep. But it is there in
dozens of examples and several informal definitions. In his essay
"The Panda's Thumb" (1978), Gould shows that the thumb, actually the
radial sesamoid bone of the Panda's wrist, is not a predictable
design of nature's necessitating laws of form, but an improvised
contraption constructed from the history of what came before. In "The
Panda's Thumb of Technology" (1987a), Gould argues that the evolution
of the QWERTY typewriter keyboard (denoting the first six letters
from the left on the top letter row) supports his theory of
contingency (22): "To understand the survival (and domination to this
day) of drastically suboptimal QWERTY, we must recognize two other
commonplaces of history, as applicable to life in geological time as
to technology over decades, contingency and incumbency." He then
defines contingency as "the chancy result of a long string of
unpredictable antecedents, rather than as a necessary outcome of
nature's laws. Such contingent events often depend crucially upon
choices from a distant past that seemed tiny and trivial at the time.
Minor perturbations early in the game can nudge a process into a new
pathway, with cascading consequences that produce an outcome vastly
different from any alternative."
This process is sometimes called "path dependency," where we get
sloted into channels, and the QWERTY example is illuminating. Regular
users of computers are locked by history into the QWERTY keyboard,
designed for nineteenth-century typewriters whose key striking
mechanisms were too slow for human finger speed. Even though more
than seventy percent of English words can be produced with the
letters DHIATENSOR, a quick glance at the keyboard will show that
most of these letters are not in a strong striking position (home row
struck by the strong first two fingers of each hand). All the vowels
in QWERTY, in fact, are removed from the strongest striking
positions, leaving only thirty-two percent of the typing on the home
row. Only about 100 words can be typed exclusively on the home row,
while the weaker left hand is required to type over 3,000 different
words alone not using the right hand at all. Another check of the
keyboard reveals the alphabetic sequence (minus the vowels) DFGHJKL.
(It appears that the original key arrangement was just a straight
alphabetical sequence, which makes sense in early experiments before
testing was done to determine a faster alignment.) The vowels were
removed to slow the typist down to prevent key jamming. This problem
was eventually remedied, but by then QWERTY was so entrenched in the
system (through manuals, teaching techniques, and other social
necessities) that it became virtually impossible to change. Unless
the major typewriter and computer companies, along with typing
schools, teachers and publishers of typewriter manuals, and a
majority of typists all decided to change simultaneously, we are
stuck with the QWERTY system indefinitely. (For the history of the
typewriter and keyboard, see Dvorak, 1936; Masi, 1985; Cassingham,
1986; David, 1986; Romano, 1986, and Hoke, 1990.)
Gould's biological version of this process is what he calls the Panda
Principle: "the complex and curious pathways of history guarantee
that most organisms and ecosystems cannot be designed optimally."
Extending this principle to technology we might call it the QWERTY
Principle: "Historical events that come together in an unplanned way
create inevitable historical outcomes."
2. The Problem of Emphasis. In the philosophy of history journal
Clio, Murdo William McRae writes: "In spite of all his dedication to
contingency and its attendant questioning of progress and
predictability, Gould equivocates often enough to cast doubt upon the
depth of his revolutionary convictions. At times he insists that
altering any antecedent event, no matter how supposedly
insignificant, diverts the course of history; at other times he
suggests that such antecedents must be significant ones" (1993, 244).
The reason for the apparent "equivocation" is that Gould knows
contingency interacts with necessity, but in his writings he
sometimes emphasizes the former over the latter to make a particular
point. Again, Gould does not offer a formal definition of necessity,
yet it is there in his writings. After he first defined what he meant
by contingency in 1987, he immediately noted that "incumbency also
reinforces the stability of a pathway once the little quirks of early
flexibility push a sequence into a firm channel. Stasis is the norm
for complex systems; change, when it happens at all, is usually rapid
and episodic" (22). And in Wonderful Life (289) Gould asks and
answers the question of emphasis:
"Am I really arguing that nothing about life's history could be
predicted, or might follow directly from general laws of nature? Of
course not; the question that we face is one of scale, or level of
focus. Life exhibits a structure obedient to physical principles. We
do not live amidst a chaos of historical circumstance unaffected by
anything accessible to the "scientific method" as traditionally
conceived. I suspect that the origin of life on earth was virtually
inevitable, given the chemical composition of early oceans and
atmospheres, and the physical principles of self-organizing systems."
Daniel Dennett goes much farther, accusing Gould of attempting to
refute the quintessential driving mechanism of evolution itself,
natural selection (308): "Can it be that Gould thinks his thesis of
radical contingency would refute the core Darwinian idea that
evolution is an algorithmic process? That is my tentative
conclusion." It is hard to imagine how Dennett came up with this
notion since it is not to be found in Gould's writings. The problem,
it would seem, stems from the fact that when one wants to emphasize a
previously neglected facet of nature, it might appear that something
is being displaced. I asked Gould about Dennett's charge and he
responded as follows (Shermer, 1996c, 88):
"My argument in Wonderful Life is that there is a domain of law and a
domain of contingency, and our struggle is to find the line between
them. The reason why the domain of contingency is so vast, and much
vaster than most people thought, is not because there isn't a lawlike
domain. It is because we are primarily interested in ourselves and we
have posited various universal laws of nature. It is because, we want
to see ourselves as results of lawlike predictability and sensible
products of the universe in that sense."
To distance his and Richard Dawkins' pure Darwinism from Gould's
contingently modified version, Dennett makes an intriguing
distinction between two types of metaphorical building devices:
skyhooks, or "miraculous lifters, unsupported and insupportable," and
cranes, "no less excellent as lifters, and they have the decided
advantage of being real" (1996, 75). Skyhooks are for
wishful-thinking whimps who can't handle the cold hard reality of
natural selection's crane: "A skyhook is a 'mind-first' force or
power or process, an exception to the principle that all design, and
apparent design, is ultimately the result of mindless, motiveless
mechanicity. A crane, in contrast, is a subprocess or special feature
of a design process that can be demonstrated to permit the local
speeding up of the basic, slow process of natural selection, and that
can be demonstrated to be itself the predictable (or retrospectively
explicable) product of the basic process" (76). Dennett accuses Gould
of trying to sneak in a skyhook while he and his brave brethern, the
unalloyed Darwinians, face the crane maker with brutal honesty. In
fact, Dennett spends no less than 50 typeset pages trying to convince
his readers that Gould is a skyhooker.
Me thinks the gentleman doth protest too much. In my opinion,
Dennett, and some others who adhere to a strict Darwinian
adaptationist program, may be trying to find in nature a nonexisting
pattern that shows us, Homo sapiens, as the nearly inevitable result
of evolution. Dennett's crane of relentless natural selection is, for
him, a skyhook, a "mind-first" force or power or process, that, run
over and over, would produce us again and again. It is something akin
to an evolutionary theology, a secular cosmogony that finds us as the
pinnacle of progressive cerebral evolution.
In the next posting I will present my model of contingent-necessity
that aims to strike a balance between the two. I thank you for your
patience.
Michael Shermer
Skeptic Magazine