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Originally Posted by d2_e4
What you are describing is "chaos theory" and evolution is the opposite of that - it's more like "the house always wins".
Never heard of chaos theory before, thanks boss.
Just because evolution has examples of convergent evolution, i.e. crabs and trees and all the other things that evolve in different times and places but are functionally the same, doesn't mean that evolution isn't subject to chaos theory. Evolution is not the opposite of it. It's subject to the whims of changing circumstances and conditions. Any notion that this, us, as humanity, as we are now, is in any sense 'inevitable' is somewhere between religion and pseudoscience. History is also completely subject to chaos theory.
The shame about all this is that historians and anthropologists are expressly told not to practice 'what ifs', presumably out of some anxiety that the rest of science doesn't view history or anthropology as scientific at all, let alone a soft science, but historians and anthropologists would be uniquely well-placed to ask 'what if Hadrian's wall weren't built and the Romans were shoved out of Britain earlier', 'what if America hadn't been founded by rich slaveowning europeans. That for me is both fascinating and very revealing.
Jared Diamond's seminal book 'Guns, Germs and Steel' almost gets there, by asking the question central to this work, 'why was it the europeans invading the americas and not the other way round'? Historical fiction is meh; counterfactual fiction is great, and part of the reason I love Philip K Dick. When you study the history of capitalism and neoliberalism and colonialism, you discover that there were early battles between their heralds and those like in the Paris Commune. Most of those battles - figurative or otherwise - were won by the counterrevolutionaries. If just some of them had gone the other way, or, maybe, if Stalin hadn't risen to power and finished the job of making the USSR a nakedly jingoistic, impoverished hellhole and actually lived up to the ideals of socialism, then we might see a VERY different world today.
One of the things that elision of 'what ifs' does is limit the range of possibilities for what we see as possible. If we think this late capitalist hellhole that we call planet earth in 2023 is inevitable, then that discourages people from trying to change things for the better. I think we should ask more 'what ifs'.