Do you feel lucky? A biologist explains we exist because of A Series of Fortunate Events
Sean B. Carroll argues that understanding the randomness of the geological and chemical processes that gave rise to life as we know it can be perspective-changing
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Posted: Dec 18, 2020 1:39 PM ET | Last Updated: December 18, 2020
Biologist Sean B. Carroll argues in his new book that we are only here due to pure chance. In fact, he says there were 70 trillion possible ways your parents could have genetically shuffled their chromosomes to make you unique.(Ethan Miller / Getty Images)
Life on Earth Is Ruled by Chance 15/12/2020
Photo: Jörg Bittner Unna/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
Prince Hamlet spent a lot of time pondering the nature of chance and probability in William Shakespeare’s tragedy. In the famous “To be or not to be” speech, he notes that we helplessly face “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” though a little earlier in the play he declares that “there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow,” suggesting that everything happens because God wills it to be so.
We can hardly fault the prince for holding two seemingly contradictory views about the nature of chance; after all, it is a puzzle that has vexed humankind through the ages. Why are we here? Or to give the question a slightly more modern spin, what sequence of events brought us here, and can we imagine a world in which we didn’t arrive on the scene at all?