Ingenious : Richard Dawkins - Issue 41 : Selection
▻http://nautil.us/issue/41/selection/ingenious-richard-dawkins
In some ways, Richard Dawkins has been thinking about contingency for most of his life. The book that catapulted him to fame, The Selfish Gene, is about one kind of contingency, which shapes genetic codes and chooses winning species (and genes). This contingency is nested in many others. In his memoir, An Appetite For Wonder, Dawkins imagines a dinosaur that would have caught and eaten the shrew-like ancestor of all mammals, had it not sneezed. “We all can regard ourselves as exquisitely improbable,” he writes. Then there are the contingencies of an individual life. Is it true, Dawkins wonders, that “the course of a named individual’s life is sucked back, magnetically, into predictable pathways, despite the Brownian buffetings of sneezes and other trivial, or not so trivial, happenings?” (...)