![]() ![]() This view contrasts with that of the historian: that the quirks, chance events, and particularities of each moment make history, and that the world could have been other than it is. From before Charles Darwin’s time up to the present it has been commonly assumed that history, both human history and the history of life in general, unfolded in a somewhat deterministic manner, that the present was inevitable, either ordained in Heaven or, in the scientific view, mechanically produced by deterministic natural laws. This essay is an adapted chapter from their book The Science and Humanism of Stephen Jay Gould (Monthly Review Press, 2011).Ī question of central importance in the interpretation of patterns of evolution is whether history had to turn out the way it did. Brett Clark is an assistant professor of sociology at North Carolina State University. Richard York is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and co-editor of the Sage journal Organization & Environment. ![]()
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