Deconstructing Darwinism with Darwin, Mayr, and Gould: Through the Lens of Evolutionary Contingency

The label “Darwinism” has been with us for so long that it seems totally unreasonable to propose to dispose of it. Yet, we maintain it has outlived its utility in so far as it acts more like a distorting lens than as a magnifying one. This will be illustrated by investigating the notion of “evolutionary contingency” in Charles Darwin, Ernst Mayr, and Stephen Jay Gould. It is a common assumption of the received view that Darwinism is consubstantial with the idea of an open-ended evolutionary process in time. However, Darwin’s many commitments toward uniformitarianism seriously limited his understanding of evolutionary contingency, while the early Mayr (roughly between 1940 and 1970) stayed too close from this forgotten Darwin to fully engage with it (notwithstanding his rhetoric to the contrary). Indeed, the way Darwin and Mayr exploited the principle of divergence closed off several open avenues to evolutionary change, thus channeling the expression of contingency. For his part, Gould made a significant contribution toward a more robust appreciation of evolutionary contingency (a view partly supported by the late Mayr (1990–2005) who by that time had retreated significantly from his earlier view), although Gould’s justification has its intellectual roots in a mythical Darwin that never existed. Evolutionary contingency has thus far played the role of a blanket notion artificially uniting “Darwinism” and obscuring important features part of Darwin’s, Mayr’s, and Gould’s brands of biology. Our analysis points to the usefulness of distinguishing between competing ontologies of evolutionary time.