Stephen Jay Gould became famous in part for his book Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. By examining the strange creatures in the Burgess Shale formation Gould makes the case that evolution is a highly contingent process, and that if you reran the experiment of life what we’d see might be very different from what we have now.
But the scientist whose study of the formation that inspired Gould’s interpretation, Simon Conway Morris, had very different views. Though it can sometimes be churlish, his rebuttal can be found in The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals. Simony Conway Morris does not believe that contingency is nearly as powerful a force as Gould would have you believe. And his viewpoints are influential. Richard Dawkins leaned on him to make the case for convergence in evolution in The Ancestor’s Tale.
This crossed my mind when reading Carl Zimmer’s new column, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth,
Mammals Took to the Skies:
Today, placental mammals like flying squirrels and marsupials like sugar gliders travel through the air from tree to tree. But Volaticotherium belonged to a different lineage and independently evolved the ability to glide.
They were not the only mammals to do so, it turns out. Dr. Luo and his colleagues have now discovered at least two other species of gliding mammals from China, which they described in the journal Nature.
…
Dr. Meng said that the growing number of fossil gliders showed that many different kinds of mammals followed the same evolutionary path. “They did their own experiments,” he said.
This ultimately comes down to physics. There are only so many ways you can make an organize that flies or glides. Mammals come to the table with a general body plan, and that can be modified only so many different ways.
This is not a foolproof point of datum in favor of convergence as opposed to contingency. Frankly these are often vague verbal arguments which are hard to refute or confirm. And even molecular evolutionary analyses come to different conclusions. It may be that we are asking the wrong question. But, it does suggest that evolution may work in a much narrower range of parameters as time progresses because of the winnowing power of selection.