Fluke

We’ve evolved to overdetect patterns. It’s safer to mistakenly assume that a rustling noise is caused by a lurking predator than to ignore a lion by dismissing the rustling as a random bit of wind. To survive, our brains have become supersensitive to movement and to understanding intent.

In a contingent world, experimentation moves us forward. Tiny, undirected mutations added up to profound advantage for one lineage of E. coli in Michigan. Commuters in London found better ways to get to work. The Beatles plucked a hit song out of the ether. And a jazz pianist, forced out of his comfort zone, adapted—creating art of unexpected beaut

Nature converges on similar solutions to common problems. Our world flits between contingency

underlying mechanism: that a microscopic chemical recipe produces variation within and between species. Several decades after his death, however, the field of evolutionary biology became shaped by an idea called the modern synthesis. It’s a simple but powerful model that is useful for understanding social and cultural change within humans as well a

moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. . . .When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, an

These ideas are related to a concept called survivorship bias, in which we can only observe that which has survived. Much of our knowledge of cavemen comes from cave paintings. It’s possible some didn’t live in caves and painted more often on the bark of trees, so we should think of them as treemen. But the trees are long gone, so we can’t say, whi

Sadly, there’s only one Earth, we can’t rewind time, and these contingency versus convergence experiments remain possible only with microbes in a science lab. For the moment, though, it seems that Lenski and Blount—and a much larger team of researchers who have worked on the LTEE—have resolved the contingency versus convergence debate: to us, the w

Evolution provides us with a crucial lesson: undirected experimenting is essential.

Connections matter as much as, if not more than, components. The more modern science puts individualism under the microscope, the less it stands up to scrutiny.