But for the historians who contribute, the value of the counterfactual is its strike against the determinism and inevitability allegedly present in Marxist history or social history, in favour of chance, contingency and the role of individual choice.
This they lament: a proper appreciation of the darkness of human hearts has "ruinously yielded in our time to chance, contingency, democracy, rationality, religious disenchantment and a callow progressivism".
Together these analyses help resolve an apparent empirical discord between of convergence and non-convergence and offer a promising approach for improving our ability to determine the roles of chance, contingency and determinism in adaptive radiation.
The concepts of "chance", "contingency" and "constraints" allow the original theory to be stretched to fit cases outside of its narrow proper domain.
However, as a general theory of evolutionary causes, the "forces" view is insufficient, and this insufficiency is not remedied by adding chance, contingency and constraints, which are vague explanatory principles, not causes.
How could evolutionary genetics produce something so odd that it fails to fit, not only the classic adaptationist paradigm, but also the reformed constraints-chance-contingency paradigm?
Gould's Wonderful Life (1989) notion of rewinding and replaying the tape of history, leading to an entirely different present day due to all sorts of chance historical contingencies, provides a valuable starting point for classroom discussions of evolutionary progress and directionality.
Is it all chance and contingency, though?
To the knowing they provide reassurance that the future is not just chance and contingency.
He reread Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations" and John Cage's writings on chance and contingency, both of which he had discovered in college, and he devoured Samuel Beckett's novels and plays.
