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By Root 548 0

selection is both constrained by contingencies and, in turn, confines them—for example, genetic mutations, chromosomal aberrations, and asteroid-triggered mass extinctions. Natural selection is also constrained by other necessitating forces such as geography, climate, and self-organizing complexity. Natural selection may be Darwin’s dangerous idea, but it is not the only one. (Contingency would also seem to undermine critics’ charges that Gould’s Marxist beliefs have shaped his evolutionary theories: contingency not only subverts evolutionary determinism, it negates socioeconomic determinism, the very foundation of Marxist ideology, because, as Gould himself notes, “when we realize that the actual outcome did not have to be, that any alteration in any step along the way would have unleashed a cascade down a different channel, we grasp the causal power of individual events. Contingency is the affirmation of control by immediate events over destiny.”)

Contingency helps us think about human meaning and freedom within a scientific perspective. Although all contingencies are caused—and thus determinism lives in the model of contingentnecessity—the number of contingent causes, and the complexity of their interactions with necessities, make the predetermination of human action essentially impossible; but because of this, the determination of human action on history becomes possible. An analogy between the physical and behavioral sciences is helpful: The movement of atoms in space, like the movement of people in the environment, is caused, but their collisions (atomic) and encounters (human) happen by contingent-necessity. Contingency leads to collisions and encounters; necessity governs speed and direction. An effect, dependent upon the activity of one or more causes, may seem to be produced by accident but is really the result of contingent-necessity, or a conjuncture of events compelling a certain course of action by constraining prior conditions. The words compelling and constraining were chosen to convey powerful influence but not omnipotence. Since we cannot possibly understand the innumerable and interactive causes of our actions, and since we will never know the initial conditions of our own personal histories, we feel free. And why not? No cause or set of causes we select to examine as the determiners of human action can be complete, thus they cannot be considered as determining causes, only influencing ones. There will always be other causes left unexamined. Human freedom arises out of this ignorance of causes, and the model of contingent-necessity explains why. And because of the trigger effect of contingency, and its cascading consequences, we are also free to change our history. Therefore: Human freedom is action taken with an ignorance of causes within a conjuncture of events, that compels and is compelled to a certain course of action by constraining prior conditions.

IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE

Though the majority of Gould’s focus has been on paleontological contingencies, his exemplar for human historical systems is the 1946 holiday film classic by Frank Capra—It’s a Wonderful Life. Jimmy Stewart plays George Bailey, a small-town building and loan proprietor who, after decades of hard, honest work feels his life has been a failure because he sees nothing of the results of his efforts, and his youthful dreams of seeing and changing the world have seemingly been lost to age and responsibility. Further, some of his friends have managed to break away from the small town to make more money. Where others have ventured out to see the world. George only fantasized about it. His own brother is a decorated war hero, who saved the lives of many men in battle. But George has done seemingly little. His life seems stalled and stagnant, and when financial and familial pressures finally build beyond control on Christmas Eve, George decides to take his life by leaping into the rapids of a nearly frozen river. Fortunately he is interrupted by his guardian angel—Clarence Oddbody—who, knowing George’s humanitarian disposition,