Those biologists who could be said to take their lead from the late Stephen Jay Gould regard all of evolution, including post-Cambrian evolution, as massively contingentlucky, unlikely to be repeated in a Kauffman rerun. Calling it "rewinding the tape of evolution," Gould independently evolved Kauffman's thought experiment. The chance of anything remotely resembling humans on a second rerun is widely seen as vanishingly small, and Gould voiced it persuasively in Wonderful Life. It was this orthodoxy that led me to the cautious self-denying ordinance of my opening chapter; led me, indeed, to undertake my backwards pilgrimage, and now leads me to forsake my pilgrim companion at Canterbury and return alone. And yet ... I have long wondered whether the hectoring orthodoxy of contingency might have gone too far. My review of Gould's Full House (reprinted in The Devil's Chaplain) defended the unpopular notion of progress in evolution: not progress towards humanityDarwin forfend!but progress in directions that are at least predictable enough to justify the word. As I shall argue in a moment, the cumulative build-up of complex adaptations like eyes, strongly suggests a version of progressespecially when coupled in imagination with some of the wonderful products of convergent evolution.
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