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Am I really arguing that nothing about life’s history could be predicted, or might follow directly from general laws of nature? Of course not; the question that we face is one of scale, or level of focus. Life exhibits a structure obedient to physical principles. We do not live amidst a chaos of historical circumstance unaffected by anything accessible to the “scientific method” as traditionally conceived. I suspect that the origin of life on earth was virtually inevitable, given the chemical composition of early oceans and atmospheres, and the physical principles of self organizing systems.

Daniel Dennett goes much farther, accusing Gould of attempting to refute the quintessential driving mechanism of evolution itself, natural selection: “Can it be that Gould thinks his thesis of radical contingency would refute the core Darwinian idea that evolution is an algorithmic process? That is my tentative conclusion.” It is hard to imagine how Dennett came up with this notion since it is not to be found in Gould’s writings. The problem, it would seem, stems from the fact that when one wants to emphasize a previously neglected facet of nature, it might appear that something is being displaced. I asked Gould about Dennett’s charge and he responded as follows:

My argument in Wonderful Life is that there is a domain of law and a domain of contingency, and our struggle is to find the line between them. The reason why the domain of contingency is so vast, and much vaster than most people thought, is not because there isn’t a lawlike domain. It is because we are primarily interested in ourselves and we have posited various universal laws of nature. It is because … we want to see ourselves as results of lawlike predictability and sensible products of the universe in that sense.

To distance his pure Darwinism from Gould’s contingently modified version, Dennett makes an intriguing distinction between two types of metaphorical building devices: skyhooks, or “miraculous lifters, unsupported and insupportable,” and cranes, “no less excellent as lifters, and they have the decided advantage of being real.” Skyhooks are for wishful-thinking whimps who can’t handle the cold, hard reality of natural selection’s crane: “A skyhook is a ‘mind-first’ force or power or process, an exception to the principle that all design, and apparent design, is ultimately the result of mindless, motiveless mechanicity. A crane, in contrast, is a subprocess or special feature of a design process that can be demonstrated to permit the local speeding up of the basic, slow process of natural selection, and that can be demonstrated to be itself the predictable (or retrospectively explicable) product of the basic process.” Dennett accuses Gould of trying to sneak in a skyhook while he and his brave brethren—the unalloyed Darwinians—face the crane maker with brutal honesty. In fact, Dennett spends no less than fifty typeset pages trying to convince his readers that Gould is a skyhooker. Me thinks the gentleman doth protest too much. In my opinion, Dennett, and some others who adhere to a strict Darwinian adaptationist program, may be trying to find in nature a nonexisting pattern that shows us—Homo sapiens—as the nearly inevitable result of evolution. Dennett’s crane of relentless natural selection is, for him, a skyhook—“a ‘mind-first’ force or power or process” that, run over and over, would produce us again and again. It is something akin to an evolutionary theology, a secular cosmogony that finds us as the pinnacle of progressive cerebral evolution.

CONTINGENT-NECESSITY

The issue of contingency and necessity remains one of the great issues of our time because it touches on such deeply meaningful issues as free will and determinism, fate and destiny, and our place in the cosmos and in history. No one captured this better than Karl Marx, who opened the second paragraph of The Eighteenth Brumaire with these now classic lines: “Men make their own history, but they do not make