Abstract
A key issue in the philosophy of biology is evolutionary contingency, the degree to which evolutionary outcomes could have been different. Contingency is typically contrasted with evolutionary convergence, where different evolutionary pathways result in the same or similar outcomes. Convergences are given as evidence against the hypothesis that evolutionary outcomes are highly contingent. But the best available treatments of contingency do not, when read closely, produce the desired contrast with convergence. Rather, they produce a picture in which any degree of contingency is compatible with any degree of convergence. This is because convergence is the repeated production of a given outcome from different starting points, and contingency has been defined without reference to the size of the space of possible outcomes. In small spaces of possibilities, the production of repeated outcomes is almost assured. This paper presents a definition of contingency which includes this modal dimension in a way that does not reduce it to the binary notion of contingency found in standard modal logic. The result is a conception of contingency which properly contrasts with convergence, given some domain of possibilities and a measure defined over it. We should therefore not ask whether evolution is contingent or convergent simpliciter, but rather about the degree to which it is contingent or convergent in various domains, as measured in various ways.
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Notes
It is not strictly accurate to talk about ‘volumes’ in this context, since ‘volume’ implies a three dimensional space and many domains of possibilities include more than three dimensions. ‘Hyper-volume’ would be more accurate in cases with more than three dimensions (thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out). Generally, any reference in this paper to ‘volume’ in a space of possibilities should be regarded as an intuitive way of talking about measures, in the sense of measure theory, over the domain. For more detail on how measure theory can be applied to domains of possibilities, see Lewis and Belanger (2015).
It is worth noting that Beatty (1995: 228–229) explicitly flags the need for a concept of contingency which comes in degrees, and warns that his account as stated may be too simple in that regard.
It may be helpful to distinguish here between sensitivity to initial conditions from chaotic dynamics. Sensitivity to initial conditions is a necessary feature of chaotic dynamics, but is not generally regarded as a sufficient condition. The exact definition of chaotic dynamics is a matter of ongoing debate, but candidates for additional necessary conditions include determinism (Smith 2007), complex non-periodic orbits in state space (Hunt and Ott 2015), and a tendency to both diverge sensitively and converge towards so called ‘strange attractors’ (Batterman 1993). None of these features are strictly contained within the idea of sensitivity to initial conditions, since it is compatible with both determinism and indeterminism, and does not strictly require that the system be confined to orbiting an attractor.
See McGhee (2011) for an overview.
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Acknowledgements
This paper has been transformed several times over by excellent feedback. I am grateful for comments on a much earlier version from John Beatty and Eric Desjardins. Two quite different versions were presented to meetings of the Consortium for the History and Philosophy of Biology, both of which received helpful commentary and suggestions. Throughout the writing process I have received invaluable feedback from Denis Walsh and Philippe Huneman, as well as reading groups at the IHPST Toronto. This research was also supported by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship.
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Lewis, C.T. The domain relativity of evolutionary contingency. Biol Philos 33, 25 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-018-9635-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-018-9635-1