SOURCE: Smith, John Maynard. “Taking a Chance on Evolution.” New York Review of Books 39, no. 9 (14 May 1992): 34-6.

In the following review of Wonderful Life and Bully for Brontosaurus, Smith discusses Gould's concept of contingency and his views about whether or not science is necessarily progressive.

Although very different in style and content, the last two books by Stephen Jay Gould—Wonderful Life and Bully for Brontosaurus—and Ernst Mayr's Toward a New Philosophy of Biology are ultimately about the same questions. Is evolutionary biology a science? If so, what kind of a science is it? Mayr's book is a collection of essays, published over the past thirty years, and addressed both to biologists and philosophers. His aim is to clarify the concepts that underlie evolutionary biology. His central theme is that these concepts make evolutionary biology an autonomous science, and not merely a subbranch of physics. This claim...