Fluke

Hindus refer to the Brahman, the concept of total unity for all that exists in the universe, in contrast to the atman, or individual soul, which only has the illusion of independence from the whole.

Convergence is the “everything happens for a reason” school of evolutionary biology. Contingency is the “stuff happens” theory.

There is a fundamental division in philosophy, between the atomistic and the relational view of the world. The atomistic view holds that our individual nature is separable, the same way that one can describe any material in the universe by subdividing it into constituent atoms. Study the components, not how they interact. As the philosopher Elizabe

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

These frameworks are useful for understanding ourselves. If our lives are driven by contingencies, then small fluctuations play a huge role in everything from our career trajectories to whom we marry and the children we have. But if convergence rules, then apparently random or chance events are more likely to be mere curiosities that don’t radicall

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

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

Survivors determine the future. Ruthless, but effective. But biologists

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.