CONCEPT
Retrospective Logic
The cognitive habit of looking backward from a known outcome and concluding the path was the only possible path—the fallacy that makes Darwin's finches look like they were collected to prove natural selection.
Retrospective logic is the ladder's handmaiden: it takes a contingent sequence of events and compresses it into a narrative of inevitability where each step leads naturally to the next.
Gould's paradigm case: the popular Darwin myth has him observing Galapagos finches with preternatural acuity and intuiting natural selection on the spot. The reality: Darwin did not know what he had collected, mixed specimens from different islands together, mislabeled species, and gave them to ornithologist John Gould who identified thirteen distinct species in January 1837—more than a year after the voyage ended. The question that would transform biology ('why are these birds similar but not identical?') did not form in the Galapagos but in London, gradually, through collaboration with an expert Darwin lacked. The formation was as contingent as the species it concerned—Darwin might have discarded specimens, given them to a less perceptive taxonomist, or John Gould might have been ill that January. Applied to AI, retrospective logic compresses the messy contingent uncertain development