Article ID: CBB587506277

Evolutionary contingency as non-trivial objective probability: Biological evitability and evolutionary trajectories (2020)

unapi

Contingency-theorists have put forth differing accounts of evolutionary contingency. The bulk of these accounts abstractly refer to certain causal structures in which an evolutionarily contingent outcome is supposedly embedded. For example, an outcome is evolutionarily contingent if it is at the end of a ‘path-dependent’ or ‘causally dependent’ causal chain. However, this paper argues that many of these proposals fail to include a desideratum – the notion of biological evitability or that evolutionary outcomes could have been otherwise – that for good theoretical reasons ought to be part of an account of evolutionary contingency. Although an inclusion of this desideratum might seem obvious enough, under some existing accounts, an outcome can be contingent yet inevitable all the same. In my diagnosis of this issue, I develop the idea of trajectory propensity to highlight the fact that there are plausible biological scenarios in which causal structures, alone, fail to exhaustively determine the biological evitability of evolutionary forms. In the second half of the paper, I present two additional desiderata of an account of evolutionary contingency and, subsequently, proffer a novel account of evolutionary contingency as non-trivial objective probability, which overcomes the shortcomings of some previous proposals. According to this outcome-based account, contingency claims are probabilistic statements about an evolutionary outcome's objective probability of evolution within a specifically defined modal range: an outcome, O, is evolutionarily contingent in modal range, R, to the degree of objective probability, P (where P is in between 1 and 0).

...More
Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB587506277/

Similar Citations

Article Nancy Cartwright; (2016)
Contingency and the order of nature (/isis/citation/CBB961115976/)

Book Tina Young Choi; (2021)
Victorian Contingencies: Experiments in Literature, Science, and Play (/isis/citation/CBB161989848/)

Article David Chandler; (2023)
Actor Network Theory and Sensing Governance: From Causation to Correlation (/isis/citation/CBB134032488/)

Article Leonore Fleming; Robert Brandon; (2015)
Why flying dogs are rare: A general theory of luck in evolutionary transitions (/isis/citation/CBB161586470/)

Article Brandon A. Conley; (2019)
Mayr and Tinbergen: disentangling and integrating (/isis/citation/CBB308076732/)

Article Díez, José A.; (2011)
On Popper's Strong Inductivism (or Strongly Inconsistent Anti-Inductivism) (/isis/citation/CBB001024145/)

Article George R. McGhee; (2016)
Can evolution be directional without being teleological? (/isis/citation/CBB533310319/)

Chapter JEAN PAUL VAN BENDEGEM; (2016)
Contingency in Mathematics: Two Case Studies (/isis/citation/CBB062227235/)

Chapter HARRY COLLINS; (2016)
Contingency and “The Art of the Soluble” (/isis/citation/CBB551368183/)

Chapter Jean-Luc Gangloff; Catherine Allamel-Raffin; (2016)
Some Remarks about the Definitions of Contingentism and Inevitabilism (/isis/citation/CBB897286199/)

Chapter JOSEPH ROUSE; (2016)
Laws, Scientific Practice, and the Contingency/Inevitability Question (/isis/citation/CBB925368184/)

Article McDonough, Jeffrey K.; (2010)
Leibniz's Optics and Contingency in Nature (/isis/citation/CBB001034597/)

Chapter Galavotti, Maria Carla; (2003)
Kinds of Probabilism (/isis/citation/CBB001213686/)

Chapter JEAN-MARC LÉVY-LEBLOND; (2016)
On the Plurality of (Theoretical) Worlds (/isis/citation/CBB014827402/)

Chapter IAN HACKING; (2016)
On the Contingency of What Counts as “Mathematics” (/isis/citation/CBB236243675/)

Chapter YVES GINGRAS; (2016)
Necessity and Contingency in the Discovery of Electron Diffraction (/isis/citation/CBB613833523/)

Chapter Emiliano Trizio; (2016)
Scientific Realism and the Contingency of the History of Science (/isis/citation/CBB273062090/)

Chapter HASOK CHANG; (2016)
Cultivating Contingency: A Case for Scientific Pluralism (/isis/citation/CBB947555912/)

Authors & Contributors

Conley, Brandon A.
Jean-Luc Gangloff
Claire Petitmengin
Catherine Allamel-Raffin
McGhee, George R.
Concepts
Contingency (philosophy)
Philosophy of science
Determinism
Controversies and disputes
Causality
Evolution
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
17th century
Places
Great Britain
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment