Chance Encounters with Our (Evolutionary) Past: Implications of Evolutionary Historicity on Environmental Ethics

Drawing on methods from philosophy and religious studies, this project interrogates scientific and essayistic writings by two paleontologists: Stephen Jay Gould and Simon Conway Morris. In particular, it investigates their debate about whether evolution is historically contingent or deterministic. Gould, also a Jewish agnostic philosopher, argues that chance-events drive evolutionary history, making outcomes (including humans) unpredictable. Conway Morris, also an Anglican Christian theologian, argues that specific evolutionary outcomes – including human-like consciousness – are inevitable and predictable, showing how evolutionary science grants insight into God. Based on their interpretations of evolutionary history, each author develops a different justification for humanity's ethical obligation to the natural environment. Beyond philosophy of biology, this debate has implications for the study of history, ethics, and theology, including how to interpret natural events as historical, how scientists incorporate religion into their work, and how to ground environmental ethics. Though informed by up-to-date biology, I approach Gould and Conway Morris primarily as philosophers and theologians whose arguments require interpretation and critique. My goal is to show how the both scientists' conclusions about evolution and environmental ethics rely on religions modes of interpretation, applied to fossils.