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.

“Turtles all the way down” has become a shorthand for an infinite regress, in which each explanation stands atop another, which stands atop another, on and on. That’s how contingency works. In a contingent world, you’re the culmination of a nearly infinite web of events, arranged with just the right strands and interlocking pattern to produce your

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

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

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

We tend to look for one cause for one effect; we tend to imagine a straightforward linear relationship between causes and effects (small causes produce small effects, while big causes produce big effects); and we tend to systematically discount the role of randomness and chance, inventing reasons even when reasons do not exist, averse to the

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,

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,

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