The Barbarian
Crabby Old White Guy
- Apr 3, 2003
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He got a lot of stuff wrong. He believed that if we started all over again from the beginning evolution would have gotten different results.
Quantum mechanics would pretty much guarantee that. At the scale of molecules, events appear to be irreducibly random. Eventually, those quantum events would produce different results on a reset. However, much would be the same because of physical laws. We have natural experiments in this from South America and Australia. And the results show that we'd have "wolves" although they might be canids, borhyaenids, or marsupials, or even a different class of animals if the clock was reset prior to mammals.
We now know that the laws are consistent everywhere in the Universe so the results are going to pretty much turn out the same.
Such as pterosaurs rather than ospreys. Or even stranger things. But that's a long way from "anything can happen", which was not Gould's point. Rather it was that there are predictable courses evolution can take, even if it carries along different sorts of organisms.
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