I think the idea failed at Gould's p1217 "Note, in the following passage, how Nietzsche refers to the chain of secondary utilites as "adaptations"; how he specifies that the steps in the sequence of utilities follow each other "at random" (in Eble's (1999) sense of unrelated to, and unpredictable from, previous states and not in the strict mathematical sense); and how he clearly recognizes the significance of this priniciple for dispersing any hope that a phyletic history might be interpreted as a "progressus towards a goal," another almost eerie similarity with Darwin's understanding of the meaning of contingency in evolution: "The whole history of a "thing", an organ, a tradition can to this extent be a continuous chain of signs, continually revealing new interpretations and adaptations, the causes of which need not be connected even amongst themselves, but rather sometimes just follow and replace one another at random. The "development" of a thing, a tradition, an organ is therefore certainly not a progressus towards a goal, still less is it a logical progressus, taking the shortest route..."
but the minimal a la Matchette may not be punishingly saved by Neitzschian superadaptive oversightc/e men should indeed , "experience, in a thousand shades and hues [not just Gould's black and white pigeon phenomenon], discloses a contingent world - the Relative Universe" "If there is a contingent, then ther must be a necessary. (in a sense this is on a different tack, what Duality itself asserts) and there is a "necessary" posited as the first cause of every sequence of contingent beings" "Clearly, if the chain of causal agencies of factors of determination contain ONLY contigent beings..."
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