Fluke

Other times, seemingly independent individual trajectories become causally interlinked, as we saw in chapter 2 with Ivan and the drifting soccer ball, a phenomenon known as Cournot contingency.

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

Our chaotic, intertwined existence reveals a potent, astonishing fact: We control nothing, but influence everything.

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

As Karen Armstrong, author of A History of God, explains, that meant that God was not a being, but being itself.

If you believe you live in a meritocratic world, in which success is doled out to the most talented individuals rather than partly by accident or chance, then it makes sense to claim full credit for each success and blame yourself for every defeat. But if you accept that apparent randomness and accidents drive significant swaths of change in our li

Expand that view, as the astronauts did gazing out of their spacecrafts, and it immediately becomes clear that individualism is a mirage. Connection defines us.

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