Contingency Theory of Stephen J. Gould

Mr. Pessimistic

I am reading up on this. I wanted to post Shermer's explication of this theory because I find it satisfactory.

So, is evolution geared toward H.Sapiens, or could we have a different outcome upon rewinding and replaying the tape?

I admit to not having much opinion at this time, as I am still trying to find more info on the theory.

Glorious Contingency

Quote:
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;" "Gould [argues] that contingency—randomness—plays a major role in the results of evolution…", and Gould "sees the evolution of humanity as being accidental, purely contingent." Yet Gould states quite clearly in Wonderful Life:

I am not speaking of randomness, 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. [Emphasis added.]

As Gould notes, contingency is an unpredictable sequence of antecedent states, not randomness, chanciness, or accident.

Daniel Dennett 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: "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 when 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 Yucatdn peninsula with pinpoint 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.

More at the linked site.

Mr. P.

The one thing of which I am positive is that there is much of which to be negative - Mr. P.

The pain in hell has two sides. The kind you can touch with your hand; the kind you can feel in your heart...Scorsese's "Mean Streets"

I came to kick ass and chew Bubble Gum...and I am all out of Bubble Gum - They Live, Roddy Piper

marti1900

Interesting stuff. But I am not sure I completely understand the difference between contingency as he uses it, and chance or randomness. Perhaps it's only the twist of semantics. Is this it?: contingency requires choice, (I choose Action A), whereas randomness makes one the passive recipient of 'fate' (asteroid wiping out population)? But does that work for amoebas and virus? Do they 'choose'? Maybe I don't want the word 'choose', but rather 'active participant'. Hmmmm

I'm working myself into a convoluted morrass here trying to make a clear difference in my mind.

Any help for the groping here?

Marti in Mexico

Mr. Pessimistic

I struggle a bit with this too...sometimes I think I am right on the mark, then the next second has me doubting.

I am reading up on this now, along with Collapse, so...

I probably posted this prematurely, but I just wanted to get some other input from the people here to help me understand it better.

Mr. P.

The one thing of which I am positive is that there is much of which to be negative - Mr. P.

The pain in hell has two sides. The kind you can touch with your hand; the kind you can feel in your heart...Scorsese's "Mean Streets"

I came to kick ass and chew Bubble Gum...and I am all out of Bubble Gum - They Live, Roddy Piper

Ken Hemingway

Here’s my take on this question.

A system is something which transforms inputs into outputs. The Earth is a system.

You can consider the Earth and its surrounding parts of the Universe (lets say the Milky Way) as it existed, 4 billion years ago, as the input.

You can consider the Earth as it is now as the output.

Now let us consider what kind of a system it is.

If it is a random system, then you could put in exactly the same inputs a number of times, and each time the output would be totally different.

A determinate system would be one in which certain aspects of the output (say the existence of humans living in cities) always comes out the same even if you make reasonably large changes in the inputs. For example you might increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and split the landmass into two large continents instead of one – and humans still show up, and develop civilizations.

A contingent system is one where even very small changes in the inputs totally change the nature of the output. So, the acidity level in a small pool close to the ocean is 1% greater than in a previous trial, and this time life does not develop at all.

Gould is claiming that the history of the Earth is contingent in exactly this sense. Other people believe that it is more determinate than that. i.e that humans would have developed under some range of initial conditions. Just how big that range is, of course, is something no one can talk about with any confidence.

Mr. Pessimistic

Again...the main issue with this theory, to me anyway and I assume to many, is how it differs from TOTAL randomness. I hear proponents say it is NOT a random system.

I like the analogy of rewinding the tape...

Mr. P.

The one thing of which I am positive is that there is much of which to be negative - Mr. P.

The pain in hell has two sides. The kind you can touch with your hand; the kind you can feel in your heart...Scorsese's "Mean Streets"

I came to kick ass and chew Bubble Gum...and I am all out of Bubble Gum - They Live, Roddy Piper

MadArchitect

The key to understanding the difference, I think, lies in placing the emphasis on the scientific process of prediction. Both randomness and contingency may be unpredictable, but they are unpredictable for different reasons. On the lowest levels, contingency may be predictable, which is why, given a set amount of information, astronomers could predict the collision of the Shoemaker-Levy comet with Jupiter in 1995. The effect was unpredictable only because there were too many factors on which the effect was contingent.

Scale plays a very large part in determining whether an event will be predictable or not. Not so with randomness, because random events are not contingent -- there's a fundamental disconnect between the effect of a random event any anything that might have caused it. Random events are so unpredictable that it seems somewhat misguided to think that we can even anticipate randomness. We can only name an event random in retrospect.

Observation indicates that most of the events in material reality are contingent, so if there are strictly random events -- and it seems fairly likely to me -- then they must take place at a microlevel several stages removed from what is observable to the unaided eye. Rolling a pair of dice, we might reflect, is not truly random, but it's contingent on so many factors that it is, in most cases, unpredictable.

Mr. Pessimistic

Thanks Mad...this helps.

Mr. P.

The one thing of which I am positive is that there is much of which to be negative - Mr. P.

The pain in hell has two sides. The kind you can touch with your hand; the kind you can feel in your heart...Scorsese's "Mean Streets"

I came to kick ass and chew Bubble Gum...and I am all out of Bubble Gum - They Live, Roddy Piper

marti1900

Hmmmm. Still thinking. I'm doing better using Ken's inputs and outputs. I'm going to let this churn a bit.

Marti in Mexico

CSflim

I find it interesting how Nature seems to repeatedly converge on similar designs.

Think of the favourite toy of the creationists - the eye. Something incredibly complex; something which seems incredibly unlikely to come about by chance.
Of course it didn't come about by chance - it came about via the process of natural selection (which merely harnesses randomness in the form of mutations). We all accept this, but what is most interesating about 'the' eye is that is that it evolved more than once. (This means that there are creatues who both have eyes, but who's closest common ancestor does not).
It would appear that natural selection has quite a knack for rediscovering "good tricks", and hence might not be as contingent as some may believe. We can understand the reason behind this by the image that two mountain climbers will find the same peak of the mountain, even if they start at opposites sides of the valley.

Of course such a metaphor stinks of adaptionist thinking, and one can only assume that Gould's contigency is simply a part of his broader assault on adaptionism.

Yet adaptionism is exactly what makes evolution work. The adaption is where the actual 'design' comes from. William Paley remarked that on coming across a pocketwatch in a forest, with all of its intricate workings, one would naturally postulate a designer. Paley was correct to an extent - it's just that we need no longer postulate God in order to explain the apperance of design - natural selection will do just fine.
Yet Gould wishes to do away with the 'Panglossian' paradigm of adaptionist thinking. But if he does that, it appears that he must answer to Paley.

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Mr. Pessimistic

Great post CS!

But as I understand it, Gould is not saying that contingency would NOT repeat certain designs, but that given another go around, certain things MAY not develop. That each step is contingent upon the previous step, and that with any variation, things can proceed very differently than we have experienced to date.

Paley's mistake also lies in good old anthropomorphism...the watch is a human invention...nature is not. Is a bird creating a nest a sign of god? To some I guess...but probably not. I agree that there is no need to assign a god as creator.

Mr. P.

The one thing of which I am positive is that there is much of which to be negative - Mr. P.

The pain in hell has two sides. The kind you can touch with your hand; the kind you can feel in your heart...Scorsese's "Mean Streets"

I came to kick ass and chew Bubble Gum...and I am all out of Bubble Gum - They Live, Roddy Piper

marti1900

All that stewing did it's work. I think I understand the difference between contingency and randomness. I applied the concept to one of my projects, and I realized that the final project is the result of the step that came before, which was the result of the step before that, which was the result of the step before that. Then I applied the idea of 'rewinding the tape', and I think there is a possiblity of a similar final result of my project, but not exactly the same result. Also there is the possibility of a totally different result.

So now I can think about Goud's ideas with much more clarity.

Marti in Mexico

MadArchitect

misterpessimistic: Is it not possible that the river simply washed branches and mud from a fallen tree down stream and they happened to collect there?

It's possible, just as it's conceivably possibly for a clock to accidentally and spontaneously form in nature without the need for a clockmaker. But the more the dam resembles a beaver dam -- branches with gnawed ends, patted down mud -- the more reasonable it is to assume that it was made by beavers.

Anyway, if such a grand creator was so meticulous in creating our ultra-complex universe, why would that same creator make such an imperfect reality...with pain, death and suffering.

I don't think it's very becoming of you to quibble with a theory that's really only engaging as a sort of Romantic intellectual exercise.

Why would such a perfectionist of a god want nature to be so brutal for the 'lower' order creatures? Why would a lion have to brutally gut a zebra in order to eat?

If you want an answer to that question, you might look at the phenomenon of Medieval beastiaries. Animals are a sort of moral allegory, and their relationships to one another are educational. But to understand the role of the beastiary in a systematic cosmology, theology or iconography, you have to understand the world picture in which they were written -- to which end I would recommend Mâle's "The Gothic Image".

If you want Paley's answer, you'll have to dig him up and ask him, or do some serious research on his theology. I don't know the answer.

If you want the answer, you're out of luck. Presuming that it's part of God's design, God hasn't been very forthcoming with a rationale. And presuming that there is no God, there's still the question of why the terms of existence are such that such a system should arise at all.

CSFilm: Do you not accept evolution (very worried...).

On the whole, yes.

If you do, then what are you arguing against? Do you not accept that Paley's argument was fallacious?

I don't see his argument as anthropomorphic. If beavers, ants, bees, nesting fowl, etc. are capable of structural design, then why should the same capacity in a deity by anthropomorphic? Beyond that, what is unique and startling about the pure conception of God in the traditions of Abraham is that the Creation story is explicitly ex nihilo, /out of nothing/, which puts it pretty far outside the range of human capacity. As finite creatures in a bounded reality, we're ultimately incapable of true creation, only rearrangement. All human creation and imagination is ultimately synthetic.

All I'm arguing is that, if we're going to reject a theory or "proof", let's do it on the proper grounds so that we're not led down the wrong path should similar arguments arise down the road. The problem with Paley's argument is that it treats material reality as a kind of artifact, a claim which the evidence tends to falsify.

CSflim: Take 'Mitochondrial Eve' a single female ancestor shared by everyone of us living today. Had she been struck by lightning (certainly an example of radical contingency) then it is quite clear that the entire chain of ancestors that culminated in modern Homo Sapiens could never have evolved.

Assuming, of course, that Mitochondrial Eve was singular. If, rather, Eve represents a population of mitochondria whose evolution in a particular direction was catalyzed by a more pervasive change in environmental pressures -- geological changes, perhaps, similar to the shift in oxygen levels presumably responsibly for the common red tint found in Triassic rock -- then the death of an individual mitochrondria, or even a relatively small mitochondrial population, might have a limited effect on the possible range of evolutionary possibilities. All of this ranges pretty deeply into the territory of science fiction, and while it's fun to consider the possible ramifications of an alternate prehistory, I'm not sure there's really any way to quantitative or qualitatively guage the contingency of significant past events upon one another. Just as we might say that replaying the tape could result in different ends, we might as easily conceive of how different starting points might have arrived at the same end.

misterpessimistic: Great post! One question: Why would it have to be apes that evolved?

Because no matter what sort of animal they had been, the alternate Homo Sapiens would have called their closest ancestor "apes". Just imagine how odd their alternate version of "Planet of the Apes" would look to us!

Doc Tiessen · Posted: Sat Apr 23, 2005 11:26 pm Post subject: Contingency Theory

I had not entered the science threads since a while... I thought there was not much going on here... It has been a very positive suprise that I was wrong...

I enjoyed the discussion very much... and I have done a lot of reading... but I am still confused about one major issue...

What is the difference between contingency and randomness?

I know that some have tried to answer to this... I have even read a lot about Gould... but I am still struggling. Am I a bit retarded? Or why do I have problems in seeing the differences at the deepest level?

Diversity is Good!

MadArchitect · Posted: Sun Apr 24, 2005 12:18 am Post subject: Re: Contingency Theory

Or why do I have problems in seeing the differences at the deepest level?

Beats me. I'm not really sure where you're having the problem, so I can't even begin to address why. My answer is not Gould's answer (haven't read much Gould), but why don't you look over the posts I've made in this thread and tell me where my argument falls apart for you. Then, maybe, I'll know where to start.

Doc Tiessen · Posted: Sun Apr 24, 2005 3:00 am Post subject: Contingency

MadA,

I had read your explanation, but I was still not very certain. Ok, let me take some points of your post to explain why I have problems.

The key to understanding the difference, I think, lies in placing the emphasis on the scientific process of prediction.

You mean that one is more predictable than the other?

Both randomness and contingency may be unpredictable, but they are unpredictable for different reasons.

You use the word "may"... you mean that they are sometimes and other times not? Or do you want to avoid to be too definitive as to say that they are surely non-predictable? Are they unpredictable to a different degree? Or are they are both equally unpredictable but for different reasons? Which reasons? What is the reason for the unpredictability of randomness? What is the reason for contingency?

Scale plays a very large part in determining whether an event will be predictable or not. Not so with randomness, because random events are not contingent

This is a circular argument. You cannot explain that randomness and contingency are different by saying this in the explanation. Why are random events not contingent?
But ok, you speak of scale. Do you mean that random is at the microscale and contingency is at the macroscale? Could you then say that quantical randomness is the basis of astrophysical contingency? Does contingency not happen at the atomic scale? Is contingency the observable macroscopic result of randomness?

There's a fundamental disconnect between the effect of a random event any anything that might have caused it.

Yes, cause and effect are separated. This is a basic premise of modern science.

Random events are so unpredictable that it seems somewhat misguided to think that we can even anticipate randomness.


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