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By Root 580 0

something like a million distinct modifications, each of a special type and dependent on some precedent changes in the organic and inorganic environments, or in both. The chances against such an enormously long series of definite modifications having occurred twice over … are almost infinite.” And Wallace did not know what we know about human evolution: His “million distinct modifications” is probably off by orders of magnitude. We now know that human evolution goes back millions of years, and that is just for the lineage leading to us. What if we rewound the tape to include the evolution of all primates, or all mammals, or all life on Earth? Trillions of distinct modifications over the last three billion years since life began would need to proceed along similar lines to produce our little twig a second time.

Is the cosmos itself so contingent? If we rewound the tape back to the beginning of the universe would there be another Big Bang, another universe just like ours? No one knows, but if recent cosmological models pan out it would appear that there are a near infinite number of bubble universes all with slightly different laws of nature. Chances are another universe like ours would reappear, which means that galaxies like ours with stars like ours would form again and again. Recent evidence also leads us to believe that planetary formation is a commonplace event in the galaxy. It is still a little soon to be drawing any definite conclusions, but with enough stars (roughly 400 billion in our galaxy alone), chances are there will be other Earth-like planets, maybe hundreds of thousands of them, the right distance from the home star to give rise to life. It would appear that physical systems are more governed by necessity, while living systems are more governed by contingency.

But this is oversimplifying matters. The actual evolution of life on a planet is really governed by contingent-necessity, and since we cannot remove living organisms from their physical environment, these relative estimates of potential “other Earths” depend on when in the sequence the tape begins again. Moreover, since no one really cares about whether cockroaches would reappear, let’s cut to the chase and ask whether a primate species with a big enough brain to have consciousness, symbolic language, religion, awareness of its own mortality, and a developed enough system of thought to ask this very question would evolve again. We cannot run the experiment, of course, but we do not need to, because history has done it for us. The fossil record, while still fragmented and desultory, is complete enough now to show us that over the past thirty million years we can conservatively estimate that hundreds of primate species have lived out their lives in the nooks and crannies of rain forests around the world; over the past ten million years dozens of great ape species have forged specialized niches on the planet; and over the last six million years, since the hominid split from such great apes as gorillas, chimps, and orangutans occurred, dozens of bipedal, tool-using hominid species have struggled for survival.

If these hominids were so necessitated by the laws of evolutionary progress, why is it that only a handful of those myriad pongids and hominids have survived? If braininess is such an inevitable product of necessitating trends of nature, then why has only one hominid species managed to survive long enough to ask the question? What happened to those big-brained hominids Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, Homo ergaster, Homo erectus. Homo heidelbergensis, and Homo neanderthalensis? If big brains are so great, why did all but one of their owners go extinct (including the Neanderthals, whose brains were slightly larger than our own)? And before them, what happened to the bipedal, tool-using Australopithecines: anamensis, afarensis, africanus, aethiopicus, robustus, boisei, and, most recently, garhi? Discovery after discovery coming out of Africa reveals our ancestors to be puny, small-brained creatures walking upright, using tools, and eating meat, allegedly