CONCEPT
Replay the Tape
Gould’s thought experiment—wind evolutionary history back to any prior point and let it run forward again—and the argument, transferred to AI, that the specific systems we have are contingent survivors of specific accidents, not the inevitable expressions of technological destiny.
Wind the tape of life back to the Burgess Shale, 530 million years ago, when the Cambrian explosion was populating the seas with an extravagant diversity of body plans. Let it run forward again, with the same initial conditions but a different sequence of contingent events. Would the result be the same?
Stephen Jay Gould’s answer, developed across the essays of
Wonderful Life (1989), was unequivocal and provocative: replay the tape, and you get a fundamentally different world. Humans would almost certainly not evolve. The specific organisms that survived the specific extinction events that shaped the modern biosphere are not the best organisms; they are the organisms that happened to possess features that were irrelevant to fitness in the pre-crisis world and decisive in the post-crisis one. The Burgess Shale fauna included dozens of viable body plans, most of which went extinct not because they were inferior but because the specific contingent events that