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Chapter 3, Is Life a Glorious Accident? No Chance

“A Glorious Accident” is the way Stephen Jay Gould viewed the arrival through evolution of conscious humans on Earth. Gould was the famous professor of paleontology at Harvard, dying in 2002, and a facile writer of many essays and books popularizing his thesis. We will begin to answer the question in the title of this chapter by examining his thoughts in A Glorious Accident, a transcription of a Public Television Series roundtable discussion conducted by Wim Kayzer (1997). Kayzer asked Gould: “You wrote: ‘Through no fault of our own, and by dint of no cosmic plan or conscious purpose, we have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life’s continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role…..but here we are.’ What was that glorious accident?” I have abbreviated Gould’s response, but with no intent to change his meaning: “The accident is 60 trillion contingent events that eventually led to the emergence of Homo sapiens. It’s that no species now alive is predictable, and any species that exists does so by the merest good fortune of tens of thousands of antecedent events that went one way and not the other. If the dinosaurs hadn’t died out, we wouldn’t be here….There are six thousand species of mammals, none of which---outside the order of primates---is threatening to become a powerfully conscious species with this kind of strength and influence over the rest of the earth. If intelligence was meant to be, you’d think it would have evolved convergently in lots of other lineages. It’s just a weird invention that developed in one odd species, [out of about] some 200 species of primates, living on the African savannas a couple of million years ago.”

It is Gould’s contention that the entire development of life in its earliest forms and the evolution into ‘us’ is entirely chance and accident. By contingent he means each step of the way is determined by a previous step, a very exacting process.  And he quotes enormous odds against our happening along when asked if we re-ran the tape of evolution a million times or 100 million times: “Take groups of ten out a pool of a hundred, there’s seventeen trillion groups of ten. So you never get the same result twice.”