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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, 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, 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 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, 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”? Mathematicians Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart published a feature story on “Chaos, Contingency, and Convergence” in Nonlinear Science Today, centered around Wonderful Life. Wired magazine’s Kevin Kelly devotes several pages to Gould’s contingency. Philosophers also got in on the discussion. Murdo William McRae published a critique entitled “Stephen Jay Gould and the Contingent Nature of History.” And, most exhaustively, Daniel Dennett devoted a Brobdingnagian chapter to Gould and this idea in his book Darwin’s Dangerous 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: “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.” Kelly has actually run Gould’s thought experiment in a sandbox with contrary results: “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: “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 a “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 dangerous idea, but also helps us understand how to find meaning in a contingent universe.

The Problem of Meaning

Many of those who oppose the idea of a predominantly contingent universe