JTW's Evolutionary Origins - Author: Dubrovsky, Bernardo

Historical Contingency

"...with the theory of evolution, as with statistical thermodynamics, the notion of contingency became established in the very heart of nature. Since Newton, physics had been based on a rigid determinism, which extended to all the sciences. Evolutionary theory and statistical thermodynamics completely transformed the way of looking at nature, mainly because they brought together and gave the same status of related and measurable quantities to order and chance - two concepts which until then had been incompatible"
(Francois Jacob, 1976, quoted in Dubrovsky, 2002, pp. 2)

"Gould appropriately distinguishes between that is referred to as contingency and the notion of chance. Pure chance precludes any explanation of particulars, but contingency, while denying that predictions can be made with confidence at the outset, does assert the possibility of explanation after a particular history has unfolded. Contingency represents the historian's mode of knowability; pure chance denies that particulars can be explicated at all (Gould, 1993). However, chance, far from being the same as indeterminacy, obeys a type of lawfulness or determination; the laws of chance."
(Dubrovsky, 2002, pp. 2)

• Dubrovsky, Bernardo
  • Evolutionary Psychiatry: Adaptionist and Nonadaptionist Conceptualizations
  • Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology & Biological Psychiatry: Vol. 26, pp. 1-19
  • 2002
  • [Pubmed]
    
    

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