* This is the latest installment of “Problematica.” It is written by Max Dresow…
Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole resides on the southern tip of Cape Cod, a short ferry ride from the wealthy enclave of Martha’s Vineyard. It was founded in 1888, with University of Chicago biologist Charles Whitman as director, and since 2013 has been formally affiliated with Whitman’s home institution. During its first several decades the laboratory became a haven for Chicago biologists, for whom Lake Michigan seemed a poor substitute for a proper ocean thronged with marine life. This is the someone improbable reason that Woods Hole contains two roads named for Chicago biologists: not just Whitman, but also his successor as MBL director, Frank R. Lillie.
Cape Cod is a place that puts you in a historical mood. Here the past intermingles with the present in an unusually insistent way. Almost everywhere you look there is something old— if not a feature of the human landscape, then one of the geology. The Cape is a narrow tongue of land that licks intemperately into the Atlantic Ocean. It formed when the Laurentide Ice Sheet first advanced and then retreated from the area, leaving a residue of glacial deposits overlying the crystalline bedrock. The ice sheet was massive. At its greatest extent it spread itself over much of Canada and the northern United States, reaching as far south as the Ohio River. This took place between about 95,000 and 20,000 years ago. Then, by 18,000 years ago, it was gone (from Massachusetts, anyway). What remained was a mangle of rock and sediment scoured by the ice. The subsequent history of the Cape is largely a story of rising seas inundating and reshaping these deposits: a process that continues to this day, and sometimes causes very real problems, as when two lighthouses needed to be moved in the nineties before they toppled into the sea.*
[* Thoreau, in his postumously published Cape Cod, relates a similar story. Apparently, in the early part of the 19th century, government officials warned that the destruction of trees and brush on the seaward side of the Cape had caused the “original surface of the ground [to be] broken up and removed by the wind toward the Harbor.” This was near Provincetown, at the very tip of the peninsula. The problem was serious enough that officials feared the town’s destruction, and recommended an aggressive program of sea-grass planting. “Thus,” Thoreau wrote, “Cape Cod is anchored to the heavens… by a myriad little cables of beach-grass, and, if they should fail, would become a total wreck, and erelong go to the bottom.”]
I implied that Cape Cod is old, and in a sense it is. Tourist materials inform you that the name “Cape Cod” is the ninth oldest English place name in the United States, coined in 1602 by a barrister and privateer named Benjamin Gosnold. An enthusiastic colonist, Gosnold also named “Martha’s Vineyard” after his daughter who had died in infancy several years earlier. He joined her in death in 1607, thirteen years before passengers on the Mayflower first caught sight of the Cape. It just doesn’t get much older than this as far as the history of our settler nation is concerned. But geologically, Cape Cod is a newcomer, Late Pleistocene in age and veritably wet behind the ears. This makes it a place of mixed temporalities, and as apt a spot as any to reflect on the nature of history and its most conspicuous feature— contingency.
I have contingency on the brain because it was the subject of the most recent MBL-ASU History of Biology Seminar (“Replaying Life’s Tape: Historical Contingency in the Life Sciences”). The event was organized by John Beatty and Alison McConwell and featured a remarkable group of speakers, including historians, philosophers, and an unusually large number of practicing scientists. All career stages were represented— in fact, one speaker, Reena Debray, came straight from what I imagine was a highly successful PhD defense in Berkeley. On the other side of things, Everett Mendelsohn was there, 92 years old and still brimming with enthusiasm. The talks were uniformly excellent, the discussions stimulating, and the conversations warm and convivial. Let this be my advertisement for future MBL-ASU History of Biology seminars. I have been to two of them now, and each has been a rich, if exhausting, experience, well worth the not-inconsiderable investment of time. (They run for six jam-packed days, which swells to eight if you budget for travel.)
The participants of the recent MBL-ASU History of Biology Seminar
I am not going to attempt a summary of the week’s activities here. That was the unenviable task given to Roberta Millstein, and perhaps a future edited volume will contain a polished version of her remarks. There is one task I can’t sidestep however. Historical contingency. Now what exactly is that? If I tell you that we failed to resolve the issue over a week of discussion, you will hardly fall out of your chair. Still, it is worth lingering on the question for a moment.
To say that something— an event or outcome— is historically contingent is to say, at least, that it could have been otherwise. It could have been the case that no roads in Woods Hole were named for Chicago biologists. Or that no such place as Woods Hole ever existed. (Imagine if the Laurentide Ice Sheet had not reached modern-day Massachusetts. Then there would be no such thing as Cape Cod, and no Woods Hole either.) Something that could not have been otherwise is not contingent, it is necessary. It is true in all possible worlds, if you’re into that sort of thing.* A contingent outcome is true in only some possible worlds. I am being a bit sloppy here, but the basic point ought to be clear. Contingent outcomes are distinct from necessary ones. This is what we might call a “minimal sense” of contingency.
[* Actually, the things that are supposed to be true in all possible world are necessary truths: truths of logic, say. In discussions of contingency in evolution, the sense of necessity in view is different. It refers to “physical necessity,” or something like that: the kind of necessity underwritten by laws of nature. Something that is physically necessary in our world will not be physically necessary in all possible worlds— it will only be necessary in those worlds whose laws of nature resemble our own.]
Minimal contingency is all well and good. But in discussions of contingency in evolution, the term “contingency” carries a whiff of improbability. It is not just unnecessary that there are two streets in Woods Hole named after Chicago biologists. It is also unlikely, contingent on a slew of historical details lining up just right. Had one or a few of these details been misaligned, then the outcome would have failed to obtain and another, quite different one would have taken its place. To label an outcome “contingent,” then, is to draw attention to the sequence of unique events (or “contingencies”) required to bring it about: it is not just to flag that it could have been otherwise.
Discussions of contingency in the life sciences are as old as biology itself, but when it comes to discussions of “contingency” per se, an important touchstone is Wonderful Life. This is the book Stephen Jay Gould published in 1989, which is now best remembered for popularizing the expression “replaying life’s tape.” (Hey, that’s the name of the seminar!) The associated thought experiment runs as follows. Imagine you are able to “rewind the tape of life” and play it again from scratch. During this “replay,” the history of life as you know it will be erased and written over with something new. But what exactly? How closely will this new history of life resemble the old one, both in its broad contours and its intimate details? And, since one detail interests us most of all, how likely is it that human-like intelligence will evolve anew? Gould’s answer to the last question is, “not very.” In fact, “any replay of the tape [will] lead evolution down a pathway radically different from the road actually taken.” Evolution is a historical process, and the “essence of history” is contingency. This suggests that human intelligence is a cosmic accident that almost certainly would not reappear if the history of life could be run back to the beginning and allowed to unfold again under the same or similar conditions.
There are many difficulties involved in interpreting what Gould is up to. I’m not going to rehearse these here (for those interested in the details, I recommend that you check out John Beatty’s post from 2017, which I recently re-posted in honor of the seminar). Instead, I want to consider an issue that did not arise during our discussions at MBL. That is: just how effective is Gould’s argument anyway? By this I don’t mean how effective is it scientifically. Gould’s argument is a scientific argument—it is an argument that the history of life would unfold very differently if the “tape of life” could be run again from the Cambrian radiation. (The whole thing is strung together with gossamer threads of intuition, but that is not my concern here.) No, what I am interested in is how effective the argument is as a broadside against anthropocentrism: the view that humans are the most important things in the world.
As Derek Turner suggested at the seminar, a central aim of the “replay experiment” is to undermine anthropocentrism by severing its connections with evolutionary theory. Gould takes it to be a comforting thought that humans are the inevitable result of a progressive evolutionary process: a process that, left to its own devices, was bound to produce something like a human mind. The replay experiment seeks to problematize this by showing that humans are thoroughly accidental. Take one wrong turn on the evolutionary path leading to humans and bam!—not only are humans erased from the subsequent history of life, but so is the best chance of producing anything resembling a human mind. (Gould really thinks this. The last pages of Wonderful Life walk readers through a series of counterfactual scenarios. What if the eukaryotic cell hadn’t come together? What if the Ediacaran biota hadn’t gone extinct? What if a different set of anatomical designs had swum through to the Ordovician Period? Etc. At each check-point, the unrealized possibility erases humans— and I gather, anything resembling a human mind— from the subsequent history of life.)
All this has the desired effect of making human minds seem far from inevitable, and indeed next-to-miraculous. But isn’t this perhaps a bit of a problem? Maybe Gould is right that some people take solace in the idea that human minds emerged inevitably from a progressive evolutionary process. I can imagine a liberal theologian from the early part of the twentieth century taking this view. (Why did God set up the universe in the way He did? Because He knew it was bound to produce human-like minds in their multitudes.) However, I submit that what is more conducive to human arrogance is the notion that humans are just extra special things. Perhaps we are improbable— okay, fine— but if the reason is that something so utterly unique is hard to pull off, then human arrogance escapes unscathed. Ask yourself which of these is more damaging to anthropocentrism: the notion that we are improbable because our defining feature is incredibly difficult to evolve, or the notion that we are ordinary products of evolution, brainy but not miraculous? Gould opts for Door A, and, I think, stubs his toe on the way through.
The view from Woods Hole Road near dusk
But here is another question. Haven’t we spent enough time thinking about what Gould said about contingency? Many people have written about contingency besides Gould, after all. David Raup is a name that came up several times during our week at MBL. Likewise George Gaylord Simpson. This means even those of us with a penchant for twentieth century paleontology have material for reflection beyond the “sage of Cambridge, Mass.” But we can do more. What might we gain from thinking about contingency outside the categories and metaphors that Gould bequeathed to us? This was Luis Campos’s question, and it is a good one. Gould came to occupy a central place in discussions of historical contingency because his metaphor of “life’s tape” was just so compelling. Once you’ve heard it, it’s hard to get it out of your head. But metaphors provide fetters for the imagination just as easily as they provide wings. Certainly there is some irony in the fact that Gould’s metaphor channeled so much thought about contingency in Gouldian directions: a contingent effect if ever there was, comparable to the priority effects studied in Reena’s work. What if things had been different?
I came to MBL wondering what was left to say about contingency in biology. I left wondering how we have spilt so much ink on the subject and yet managed to say so little. By this I do not mean to diminish the value of existing work on historical contingency; John Beatty’s “Replaying Life’s Tape” was published in The Journal of Philosophy for goodness’ sake! Rather, I am struck by how few of the conceptual possibilities surrounding notions of contingency and historicity we have yet explored. We knew Gould, and so we stuck close to the arguments set out in Wonderful Life. Now the task is to slip our Gouldian fetters and look around a bit. Who knows what strange vistas will reveal themselves in our emboldened, contingent ramblings?
References
Beatty, J. 2006. Replaying life’s tape. The Journal of Philosophy 103:336–362.
Gould, S.J. 1989. Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Thoreau, H. 1865. Cape Cod. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.