ArticleInterface focus2015
Convergent evolution as natural experiment: the tape of life reconsidered.
Article in Interface focus, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 68 citations in OpenAlex.
- Enhanced dynamicity: evolutionary insights into amphibian mitogenomes architecture.BMC genomics · 2025Article
- Convergent evolution in angiosperms adapted to cold climates.Plant communications · 2025Review
- On the prospects of basal cognition research becoming fully evolutionary: promising avenues and cautionary notes.History and philosophy of the life sciences · 2025Article
- Measuring homoplasy I: comprehensive measures of maximum and minimum cost under parsimony across discrete cost matrix character types.Cladistics : the international journal of the Willi Hennig Society · 2025Article
- Intervention and experiment.European journal for philosophy of science · 2025Article
- Alternative Pathways in Astrobiology: Reviewing and Synthesizing Contingency and Non-Biomolecular Origins of Terrestrial and Extraterrestrial Life.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Multiple Routes to Color Convergence in a Radiation of Neotropical Poison Frogs.Systematic biology · 2023Article
- Little bits of dragonfly history repeating exemplified by a new Pennsylvanian family.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Evolutionary Pathways and Trajectories in Antibiotic Resistance.Clinical microbiology reviews · 2021Article
- Towards a unified framework to study causality in Earth-life systems.Molecular ecology · 2021Article
- Quantifying the extent of morphological homoplasy: A phylogenetic analysis of 490 characters inEvolution letters · 2019Article
- Conserved transcriptomic profiles underpin monogamy across vertebrates.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Is behavioural flexibility evidence of cognitive complexity? How evolution can inform comparative cognition.Interface focus · 2017Article
- Evolutionary convergence and biologically embodied cognition.Interface focus · 2017Review
- Quantification provides a conceptual basis for convergent evolution.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2017Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Stephen Jay Gould argued that replaying the 'tape of life' would result in radically different evolutionary outcomes. Recently, biologists and philosophers of science have paid increasing attention to the theoretical importance of convergent evolution-the independent origination of similar biological forms and functions-which many interpret as evidence against Gould's thesis. In this paper, we examine the evidentiary relevance of convergent evolution for the radical contingency debate. We show that under the right conditions, episodes of convergent evolution can constitute valid natural experiments that support inferences regarding the deep counterfactual stability of macroevolutionary outcomes. However, we argue that proponents of convergence have problematically lumped causally heterogeneous phenomena into a single evidentiary basket, in effect treating all convergent events as if they are of equivalent theoretical import. As a result, the 'critique from convergent evolution' fails to engage with key claims of the radical contingency thesis. To remedy this, we develop ways to break down the heterogeneous set of convergent events based on the nature of the generalizations they support. Adopting this more nuanced approach to convergent evolution allows us to differentiate iterated evolutionary outcomes that are probably common among alternative evolutionary histories and subject to law-like generalizations, from those that do little to undermine and may even support, the Gouldian view of life.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.