Rachell Powell
speaker
762 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 26 Jan
Rachell Powell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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can essentially be treated as tantamount to natural experimental replications in the history of life.
So yes, we cannot actually go back in time, make some, you know, muture around with the environment and the genetics and everything and then see what happens.
but we can you know but thankfully nature has done that for us by running these tapes over and over again at smaller scales and we see repetition and that is indicative of a law-like necessity that is inconsistent with the contingency thesis and kind of gives us a data set that we can work with in the absence of extraterrestrial information and um
The problem with this, though, is that the way that convergence had been looked at is as a monolithic, homogeneous phenomenon.
There's repetitions, therefore, Gould is wrong.
And I think that's a mistaken way of thinking about it.
And I think that it's critical that you sort of look at what the underlying causes of the repetitions are.
And what happens is that certain kinds of repetitions start to look like, well, maybe these really do fly in the face of a Gouldian contingency theory.
Whereas other kinds of repetitions don't.
So I think we need to really be careful in parsing that data set before we can make any conclusions about – any grander conclusions about a cosmic biology and that sort of thing.
Yeah, no, no, that's right.
That's right.
And in fact, you know, um, I mean, it's interesting though, because the convergence phenomenon is supposed to cut against the Gouldian picture.
Okay.
Um, that's how most people interpret it.
Um, uh, but actually like, I think that looking at the, at the, the, uh,
the nature of life or the living universe through a convergentist lens is actually critical to many of the projects that Gould was trying to promote, like anti-progressivism.
Because it gets us outside of ourselves
So I mean, in a way, you're right.
The Copernican principles and so forth, it's all sort of indexed to us.
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