... "Higher" life forms, far from being the logical or necessary emergence from life as it existed in the first billion years or so, were in fact highly unlikely. That we find ourselves here is the result of innumerable contingencies, none of which had a high probability. Carrol Cox
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I think this is wrong---deeply wrong.
What Gould forgot, which is a little difficult to imagine, ... is that the tape of life is in constant replay, every nano-second. The molecular machinery has never stopped. It is in a constant high speed loop. Seen in a certain abstract way life is nothing more than the self-correcting molecular machine that has adapted itself to every possibility it has ever encountered, and that most especially includes whatever randomness there maybe at its various orders of magnitude.
Life knows nothing about higher or lower forms. It understands differences in modes of adaptation. What we call higher is nothing more than more articulated and more sophisticated layers of organization that make the organism more adaptable to its environment and better able to survive the environment, and further to inhabit different sorts of more highly ordered environmental systems that arise from the already highly ordered physical world.
Over the course of time, living systems have continuously re-invented so called higher systems. Whether a large scale history re-run would result in me typing on a computer to argue this, is of course utterly irrelevant.
To see this re-invention, just look at the colonization of land from sea dwelling orders. Or consider the partitioning of dinasours into herbivores and their predators, and associated flora---our current clades of the great grasslands and their fauna in the Americas, Central Asia and Africa are a re-invention of their long gone ancestors of tooth and claw, their scales turned to feathers and fur, their pelvic architecture accomodating live birth and so forth.
I know much less about the oceans, but I know enough to have seen the great annual migrations along the California coast as everything from anchoves to great whales move up from Mexico on their way to Alaska. I can see these same large scale collections following similar currents and feeding systems millions of years ago in other classes descending different orders...
I mean this great continuity is quite beautiful in the old Pythagorean sense of Ovid's metamorphosis.
As for went the Sun goes supernova... It probably won't because it is not big enough. And think on this. I found out recently that the oldest star found in the Milky Way is 13.2Gyrs old. It's denoted as HE 1523 something. That is about 500 million years after the big bang. It's age was determined by uranium and thorium ratios, and these are independent of various large scale cosmological theories. I think it just a matter of time before we start finding stars that are too old to exist in the current form. You already have to seriously tweak BB theory to get to HE 1523 since the presence of heavy elements in its spectrum can only be explained by the rapid neutron addition process of a previous star going supernova---which means it's parents had to condense, evolve on the stellar evolution track, collapse, go nova, have those elements re-condense and re-ignite all in less than 500 million years. Sure that works...
CG
Whether the above is `progress' I have no idea...