On the “Duel” Nature of History: Revisiting Contingency versus Determinism

What is the relationship between external—physical and biological—influences on increasingly complex matter over billions of years? In his most recent book, Islands in the Cosmos: the Evolution of Life on Land, Dale Russell attempts to answer this question. Russell is the senior curator of paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and, among other things, is well known for proposing in 1971 an extraterrestrial cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs [2]. This places Russell among the first paleontologists to consider this extinction as a relatively sudden event in Earth’s history. Dale Russell has spent his lifetime pondering grand evolutionary questions, and it is a quest that Islands in the Cosmos well illustrates. His central thesis explains that evolutionary theory (as he views it)—based on ‘‘random mutations’’ and ‘‘adaptation to irregular changes in the physical environment’’—inadequately accounts for longterm trends in the competitive abilities of organisms and the ultimate appearance of sentient beings (e.g., Homo sapiens) in the cosmos. Russell instead proposes that even though mutations are random, because ‘‘...the effects of natural selection are not random, and modulated by adaptive responses to irregular changes in the physical environment,’’ properties of matter and feedback in biotic competition have established a deterministic trajectory in the history of life. His argument distills to the following interrelated points: