When what had to happen was not bound to happen: History, chance, narrative, evolution

Journal of the Philosophy of History

Volumn 5, Issue 3, 2011, Pages 471-495

  Beatty, John ^a   Carrera, Isabel ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA   (Canada)

^b UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL AUTÓNOMA DE MÉXICO   (Mexico)

Author keywords

Chance; Contingency; Evolution; Historical Sciences; Historicity; Narrative Explanation; Stephen Jay Gould

Indexed keywords

EID: 84859229055     PISSN: 1872261X     EISSN: 18722636     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1163/187226311X599916     Document Type: Review

References (24)

1. S.J. Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: Nor ton, 1989), 51.
2. "Introduction: The Scales of Contingency and Punctuation in History," in J. Bintlif (ed.), Structure and Contingency: Evolutionary Processes in Life and Human Society (London: Lei cester University Press, 1999), ix-x.
3. Gould, Wonderful Life, op. cit., 283, emphasis added.
4. E.C. Desjardins, "Historicity and Experimental Evolution," Biology and Philosophy, forthcoming.
5. "Essays and Reviews in History and History of Science," Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 96, part 5 (2006), 408.
6. Hamlet, the Mona Lisa, and the Mass in B-Minor would not exist if Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, and Bach had never lived. It is diferent with science, even the greatest science" 407-408.
7. Nicolaas Rupke's discussion of Gillispie, together with Rupke's contrary case study, "Darwin's Choice," 139-164, in D.R. Alexander and R.L. Numbers (eds.), Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
8. Gregory Radick, "Is the Teory of Natural Selection Independent of its History?" 143-167, in J. Hodge and G. Radick (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Darwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
9. N. Carroll, "On the Narrative Connection," 118-133
10. in Carroll, Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 130-131.
11. P. Goodman, The Structure of Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 14.
12. S.J. Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Teory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 1342-1343, emphasis added.
13. Bury, "Cleopatra's Nose," 60-69, in Selected Essays of J.B. Bury (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930); the quotation is from page 60.
14. E.H. Carr, What is History (New York: Knopf, 1965), 128.
15. "Historical Contingency," Ratio 10 (1997), 99-107.
16. Beatty, "Chance Variation: Darwin on Orchids," Philosophy of Science 73 (2004), 629-641;
17. J. Lennox, "Darwin was a Teleologist," Biology and Philosophy 8 (1993), 409-421.
18. C. Darwin, The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1877), 284-285.
19. Beatty, "Replaying Life's Tape," Journal of Philosophy 103 (2006), 336-362;
20. Beatty, "Reconsidering the Importance of Chance Variation," in G. Müller and M. Pigliucci (eds.), Evolution: The Extended Synthesis (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010);
21. Z.D. Blount, C.Z. Borland, R.E. Lenski, "Historical Contingency and the Evolution of a Key Innovation in an Experimental Population of Escherichia coli, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 105 (2008), 7899-7906, 7905.
22. W.B. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (New York: Schocken, 1964), 26.
23. G. Morson, "Narrativeness," New Literary History, 34 (2003), 59-73, 60.
24. M.-L. Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artifcial Intelligence, and Narrative Teory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 149, and all of chapter 8.