![]() ![]() But suppose that the experimental versions all yield sensible results strikingly different from the actual history of life? What could we then say about the predictability of self-conscious intelligence? or of mammals?” (Gould,1989, p. If each replay strongly resembles life’s actual pathway, then we must conclude that what really happened pretty much had to occur. Then let the tape run again and see if the repetition looks at all like the original. ![]() “You press the rewind button and, making sure you thoroughly erase everything that actually happened, go back to any time and place in the past–say, to the seas of the Burgess Shale. ![]() 45)Īccording to Gould himself, the Gedankenexperiment of ‘replaying life’s tape’ addresses “the most important question we can ask about the history of life” (p. 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.” (Gould, 1989, p. “a staggeringly improbable series of events, sensible enough in retrospect and subject to rigorous explanation, but utterly unpredictable and quite unrepeatable. ![]() In his highly influential book ‘Wonderful Life’, Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould proposed that evolution is an unpredictable process that can be characterized as ![]()
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