Our habit of using the present as a key for understanding the past.

As to our habit of using the present as a key for understanding the past. For many years, Gould fought for human evolution to be separated from human hopes, satisfying tales, and “great narratives.”)

We are the offspring of the material and contingent (A FUTuRE EVENT CANNOT BE PREIDICTED) currently we have a dramatic ever-changing environment. 

The massive contingency (the uexpectd virulemce of this Chinese virus Chine must  close your 'Wet Markets' and come into the 21st Century of hygiene.

So with human evolution means that particular events,the current day Virus, with at first its meaningless details, has been able to  shape irreversibly the course of our natural history.

 It follows that Evolutionary humility should ensue from a naturalistic way of seeing Homo sapiens as a part of a contingent process and not as its dooms day culmination.

 From another point of view, the discovery of the determinant role of contingent ecological events like floods and earthquakes gives a new vision of nature. 

Nature is neither a harmonic Eden nor a wicked nemesis. “The expressions of violence and unpredictability of natural phenomena that shock our societies so much today are the normal ecological niches where we were born. We would not be here at this moment without them