Contingency (Smolin Reading)

Contingency is the principle that the specific forms produced by evolutionary processes depend on chains of accidents that cannot be re-run. Gould famously argued that if the tape of life were replayed from the Cambrian, the specific species that eventually emerged would be different. The general direction — toward increasing complexity — might hold, because the physics favors it. But the specific configurations — the particular organisms, the particular ecosystems, the particular events — depend on contingent sequences that no law determines. Smolin's framework extends this principle to cosmology and to technology. The arrow of complexity is a feature of the physics; the specific forms the arrow produces are contingent on the unrepeatable sequences of events that actualize one possibility rather than another.