Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that the emergence of human intelligence is highly improbable and contingent upon a unique set of circumstances.
Stephen Jay Gould is reflecting on the idea of contingency in evolution, emphasizing that if we could rewind the history of life and replay it, the specific conditions and events that led to human intelligence are so rare that they would likely never happen again. This challenges the perception of human beings as the inevitable outcome of evolution, highlighting instead the role of chance and circumstance in our existence.
In practice
In a discussion about evolution and the uniqueness of human life, this quote can emphasize the role of chance.
The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it.
Some evolutionists will protest that we are caricaturing their view of adaptation. After all, do they not admit genetic drift, allometry, and a variety of reasons for nonadaptive evolution?
Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
For Dawkins, evolution is a battle among genes, each seeking to make more copies of itself. Bodies are merely the places where genes aggregate for a time.
Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline... We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have their ways of knowing, and all are valid in their proper domain. The world is too complex and interesting for one way to hold all the answers.
If Heaven and Earth are unable to persist, how could man?
...it is simplicity that is difficult to make.
It is only at the first encounter that a face makes its full impression on us.
The flame of Christian ethics is still our highest guide.
You'll forget it when you're dead, and so will I. When I'm dead, I'm going to forget everything–and I advise you to do the same.
Reason is the cause of our falsification of the evidence of the senses. In so far as the senses show becoming, passing away, change, they do not lie.
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