Seinesgleichen geschieht: Contemporary Challenges to Evolutionary Contingency

"Things of the same kind happen again" in Robert Musil's Kakania. But even in biology, similar claims have been raised since the finding of an unexpected amount of repeated evolution: the evolution of "same" traits in distinct, and even quite distant lineages facing similar environmental conditions but strictly due to mutations in the same genes. Evolutionary biology may be on the verge of becoming a more predictive science than previously deemed possible. This claim reflects a deeply changed conceptual and biotechnological research framework, issued from the merging of comparative genomics, systems biology and experimental evolution. This new perspective undermines at least some of the implications of Stephen Jay Gould's well-known "evolutionary contingency thesis": firstly, that evolutionary explanations are doomed to be purely retrodictive, and, last but not least, that evolutionary conservation may not depend on "frozen accidents" but on specific systemic conditions that foster the "repeated innovation" (Vermeij 2006) of the same.