Convergent evolution reveals to us that the number of possibilities available for contingent events is limited, that historically contingent evolution is constrained to occur within a finite number of limited pathways, and that contingent evolution is thus probabilistic and predictable. That is, the phenomenon of convergence proves that truly contingent evolutionary processes can repeatedly produce the same, or very similar, organic designs in nature and that evolution is directional in these cases. For this reason it is argued in this paper that evolution can be directional without being teleological, and that the dichotomy that evolution must either be directionless and unpredictable or directional and predetermined (teleological) is false.
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Leonore Fleming;
Robert Brandon;
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HASOK CHANG;
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Claire Petitmengin;
MICHEL BITBOL;
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Andrew Pickering;
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Freedom of Framework
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LÉNA SOLER;
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YVES GINGRAS;
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Necessity and Contingency in the Discovery of Electron Diffraction
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Emiliano Trizio;
(2016)
Scientific Realism and the Contingency of the History of Science
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LÉNA SOLER;
(2016)
The Contingentist/Inevitabilist Debate: Current State of Play, Paradigmatic Forms of Problems and Arguments, Connections to More Familiar Philosophical Themes
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JEAN PAUL VAN BENDEGEM;
(2016)
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Chapter
HARRY COLLINS;
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Contingency and “The Art of the Soluble”
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Jean-Luc Gangloff;
Catherine Allamel-Raffin;
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JOSEPH ROUSE;
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ANDREW PICKERING;
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MIEKE BOON;
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RONALD N. GIERE;
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Contingency, Conditional Realism, and the Evolution of the Sciences
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