Contingency

Many of those who oppose the idea of predominantly contingent universe have misread contingency for 'accidental' or 'random.' Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, for example, have stated explicitly that, "The survivors, who produced us, did so by contingency, by sheerest accident;" "Gould [argues] that contingency -- randomness -- plays a major role in the result of evolution....." and Gould "sees the evolution of humanity as being accidental, purely contingent." Yet Gould states quite clearly in 'Wonderful Life':

"I am not speaking of randomness, but of the central principle of all history -- contingency. A historical explanation does not rest on direct deductions from laws of nature, but on an unpredictable sequence of antecedent states, where any major change in any step of the sequence would have altered the final result. This final result is therefore dependent, or contingent, upon everything that came before -- the un-erasable and determining signature of history."

As Gould notes, contingency is an unpredictable sequence of antecedent states, not randomness, chanciness, or accident. ~ Page 218