From: Howard J. Van Till (hvantill@chartermi.net)
Date: Sat Oct 18 2003 - 09:13:50 EDT
>From: "Sarah Berel-Harrop" <sec@hal-pc.org>
> Second, this is a fair summary of Gould's views on contingency.
> This is best understood as almost polemics against hyper-
> selective accounts of evolution. The idea is that selection,
> drift, etc are occuring simultaneously and contingency also plays
> a role. That is - there are unpredictable historical factors
> - from a strictly naturalistic point of view. It is precisely
> Gould's views on contingency that cause some lay atheists to
> accuse Gould of "giving comfort to the enemy" in the sense of
> the possibility of _insert God here, in this one-time historical
> event_. In this sense, the quote is saying, not that God is
> not a factor, but that the "tape" does not follow a deterministic
> pattern.
Sarah,
Simon Conway Morris's new book, Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a
Lonely Universe, builds a case for assigning a larger role to convergence so
that replaying the tape would yield differences in the details (contingency
is real), but significant similarities on more general terms. Any comments?
Howard Van Till
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