Contingency Across the Life Sciences
How Accidents Can Be Consequential
Contingency Across the Life Sciences
How Accidents Can Be Consequential
With perspectives from biology, history, and philosophy, an investigation of the meaning and importance of contingency in the life sciences.
Were the outcomes of evolution, humans included, inevitable? In his 1989 book Wonderful Life, Stephen Jay Gould invited his readers to replay “life’s tape”—“You press the rewind button and, making sure you thoroughly erase everything that actually happened, go back to any time and place in the past—say, to the seas of the Burgess Shale. Then let the tape run again.” If the outcomes of evolution truly depend on historical contingencies, you might not get anything at all like the same trajectory—maybe no humans or anything human-like. In the first book of its kind, Contingency Across the Life Sciences brings together scientists, philosophers, and historians to explore when historical contingency really matters for our understanding of the biological past and our place within it.
Using Darwin’s and Gould’s views on chance and contingency as a starting point, the chapters clarify the many different meanings of contingency and show how biologists have moved beyond the tape of life metaphor to find contingency in a range of ecological, evolutionary, and developmental processes, including experiments with contingency in actual populations. The collection ends with a set of reflections on how historical contingency can change the ways we see ourselves as biological and moral agents in a world that could have been otherwise.
432 pages | 23 halftones | 6 x 9
Convening Science: Discovery at the Marine Biological Laboratory
Biological Sciences: Evolutionary Biology
Reviews
Table of Contents
Chapter 1. That’s Life! On Historical Contingency
Alison K. McConwell, Roberta L. Millstein, Michael R. Dietrich, and John Beatty
Part I. Historical Contingency: A Deeper Dive
Chapter 2. A Plurality of Contingencies: A Reference Guide
Roberta L. Millstein
Chapter 3. Contingency in the Historical Sciences: Gould’s Middle Way Between the Particular and the General
Alison K. McConwell
Chapter 4. What Does It Mean to Say That “History Matters,” Causally Speaking?
Eric Desjardins and John Beatty
Chapter 5. Nonlinear Contingency: Ants, Fungi, and Feedback
Eric Anderson
Chapter 6. Spaces of Possibility and the Contingency of Evolutionary Novelty
Douglas H. Erwin
Part II. Historical Contingency: Evolutionary Biology and Beyond
Chapter 7. Primate Water Crossings and Historical Contingency: Natural Dispersals, Watercraft Voyages, and the Importance of Place
Alan de Queiroz
Chapter 8. Ecologists Have Been Debating the Role of Historical Contingency in Their Science for a Century
Sharon E. Kingsland
Chapter 9. Testing Contingency: The Origins and Early History of the Long-Term Evolution Experiment
Michael Travisano
Chapter 10. Exploring the Alternatives: The Value of Journeys Down Evolutionary Paths Not Taken
Zachary D. Blount
Chapter 11. Parallels Between Ecological and Evolutionary Accounts of Historical Contingency
Zachary D. Blount, Reena Debray, Eric Desjardins, Michael Travisano, and John Beatty
Chapter 12. Replaying Life’s Developmental Tape
Francesca Merlin and Marco Casali
Part III. Historical Contingency: What It Means to Be Human
Chapter 13. “The Saddest Doctrine of All”: The Evolution of Ethics and the Case of Darwin’s Bees
Piers J. Hale
Chapter 14. Contingency and the Darwinian Revolution
John Beatty
Chapter 15. Is Historical Contingency the Key to Moral Freedom?
Myrna Perez
Chapter 16. That’s (Human) Life: How Evolutionary Accidents Can Be Normatively Consequential
Derek D. Turner
Epilogue. Contingency and Determinism, Ecology and Evolution (or Forty Years of Replaying the Tape)
Jonathan B. Losos
Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
Index