Chapter Content
Okay, so, like, if you could go back to the very start of your life and, you know, hit replay, would things like, totally be the same? It's kind of a crazy thought, right?
So, picture this: these folks, Mr. and Mrs. H. L. Stimson, they hop off a train in Kyoto, Japan, and check into this hotel. They're, like, totally soaking up the sights – all the fall colors, right? Red maples, golden ginkgo trees… really beautiful stuff. They're checking out the gardens, the temples, you know, just doing the tourist thing for like, six days or so. But this isn't just any vacation. It's, like, a seriously historical trip. Because that Stimson name in the hotel, that becomes a record, marking events where one guy, basically, played God. Saving a hundred thousand lives in one place but, like, dooming a similar number somewhere else. Crazy, right?
Fast forward like, nineteen years, and you've got this group of scientists and generals hanging out in New Mexico. Top-secret stuff. World War II is winding down in Europe, but the Pacific is, like, still a bloodbath. So, these guys think they have a solution: this crazy powerful weapon they call the Gadget.
They haven't even tested it yet, but they know it's close. So, they put together this committee, the Target Committee, to decide *where* to use it. They agree Tokyo is out. It's already been bombed to smithereens. They're weighing up other cities, and they land on Kyoto.
See, Kyoto had factories making stuff for the war, plus destroying the old capital would be a major blow to Japanese morale, for sure. And here’s the thing, Kyoto was also an intellectual hub. The thought was, the survivors would *get* it, like, this weapon meant the war was over. So the Target Committee, they all agree, Kyoto has to go.
And they pick some backup targets, too: Hiroshima, Yokohama, Kokura. They send the list to President Truman, and then, they just wait for the bomb to be ready, you know?
Then, bam! The Atomic Age begins. They test the bomb, and it works. Military guys are looking at maps of Kyoto, picking the spot to blow it up: right near the hotel where the Stimsons stayed, can you believe it?
But then, something weird happens. August 6th, the bomb falls, but not on Kyoto. It hits Hiroshima, and like, up to 140,000 people are killed. Three days later, another bomb drops on Nagasaki, killing another 80,000.
So, what happened? Why was Kyoto spared? And why Nagasaki, which wasn't even a top target? Well, get this: roughly two hundred thousand lives were saved or lost because of a tourist trip and a cloud. Seriously.
By '45, Mr. H.L. Stimson, he's the Secretary of War, right? So, when the Target Committee picks Kyoto, Stimson flips out. He’s like, "No way, not Kyoto." He tells the head of the Manhattan Project, he tells the commander of the armed forces. But the generals, they just keep putting Kyoto back on the list. It fits the bill, they say. They don't get why Stimson is so attached to it.
They don't know about the hotel, the maples, the ginkgo trees, you know?
So, Stimson goes straight to Truman and flat-out says, "I don't want Kyoto destroyed." Truman finally gives in. Kyoto is off the list. It gets replaced with Nagasaki. Hiroshima gets hit first.
The second bomb was supposed to go to Kokura. But guess what? Clouds. Thick cloud cover. They couldn't see the ground. The pilot circled around, hoping it would clear, but it didn’t. The clouds were not in the weather forecast either. They went to a secondary target, Nagasaki. Fuel was running low, they made one last pass, and the clouds cleared, like, just in time. The bomb fell. Nagasaki was a last-minute addition, only targeted because of the weather over another city. If that bomber had taken off a few minutes earlier or later, countless people in Kokura would have been incinerated. The Japanese even have a saying for it: "Kokura's luck," when someone narrowly escapes disaster without even knowing it.
So, yeah, a cloud saved one city, and a vacation from, like, decades earlier saved another. It just messes with your head, right? We want to think there's a reason for everything, but sometimes, it's just random. It throws a wrench into our understanding of cause and effect.
We want to believe we can control the world, but how can you explain hundreds of thousands of people living or dying based on some tourist's memories or, you know, just some clouds?
Kids are always asking, "Why?" And we learn that X causes Y. It's simple, right? Touching a hot stove hurts. Smoking causes cancer. Clouds cause rain.
But in this case, clouds caused mass death in one city instead of another. And that death can only be explained by all these random, arbitrary factors coming together in just the right way: an emperor, a scientist being born, geological formations, battles, brilliant scientists, all culminating in a single vacation and a single cloud. Change any one thing, and everything could have been different.
We all have those "Kokura's luck" moments in our own lives, right? Tiny things that change our careers, relationships, our whole view of the world. But what about the pivots we *don't* see? The near misses we never even know about? We can't know what matters most, because we can't see the other paths we didn't take.
If a vacation from ages ago could mean life or death for so many, what choices are you making *now* that could drastically change *your* future, maybe even alter history? And would you even *know*?
It's weird how we think about the past versus the present. When we think about time travel, we're all worried about not touching *anything*, right? Because a tiny change could mess everything up. But in the present, we don't worry about that. We don't tiptoe around. We figure the little stuff doesn't matter. But if the past created our present, then our present is creating the future, too.
This author, Jorge Luis Borges, wrote a story about this garden of forking paths. Humans are walking through this garden, and the paths are always changing. We can see all these possible futures, but we have to choose where to go. And when we do, the paths change again. Every step matters.
But here's the kicker: we're not the only ones shaping the paths. The garden is being tended by *everyone* who came before us. And it's also being changed by the choices of people we'll never even meet. The paths are being redirected by these, like, hidden Kyoto and Kokura moments.
But when we try to explain the world, we ignore all those flukes, right? We dismiss them as meaningless. We ignore the fact that a few small changes could make our lives and societies completely different. We want to know about major, obvious causes. X causes Y, and X is always a big thing.
We're seduced by the talking heads and data analysts, who are often wrong, but rarely uncertain. When we have to pick between complex uncertainty and comfortable-but-wrong certainty, we pick the latter. Maybe the world just isn't that simple. Can we ever understand a world that's so impacted by flukes?
You see this lady, Clara Magdalen Jansen? She killed her four kids and then herself, in Wisconsin. Her husband, Paul, comes home to find them all dead. Horrific, right?
There's this idea called amor fati, which is "love of fate". You have to accept that your life is the result of *everything* that came before you. You are a combination of your ancestors. You wouldn't exist if your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc., hadn't met and had children. Your life depends on all these people living and loving just the way they did. Otherwise, different people would exist, but *you* wouldn't.
The Paul who came home to that farmhouse? That was my great-grandfather. My middle name is Paul, named after him. But I'm not related to Clara, because she ended her line of the family tree. Paul remarried.
When I was twenty, my dad showed me a newspaper clipping about it. "Terrible Act of Insane Woman." He showed me the family gravestone: the kids on one side, Clara on the other, all dying on the same day. It shocked me. But what shocked me even *more* was that if Clara hadn't done what she did, I wouldn't be here. My life was made possible by a gruesome mass murder. Those kids died, and now I'm alive. Amor fati means accepting that, embracing it, recognizing that we are the result of both the good *and* the bad in the past. We owe our existence to both kindness and cruelty, love and hate. It can't be otherwise, because then we wouldn't be us.
Richard Dawkins said, "We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones." Most people will never be born. The possible people who could have been here outnumber the grains of sand in the desert. There are limitless possible futures, full of possible people, and they are infinite. We are fragile, our existence built on the shakiest of foundations.
We pretend otherwise, but the truth is, small, accidental things can cause huge things. As a scientist, I was taught to find the X that causes Y. But then, I was in Zambia, studying a failed coup.
The plan was simple: kidnap the army commander and force him to announce the coup on the radio. But when the soldiers ran in, the commander jumped out of bed, ran out the back, and started climbing the wall. One soldier grabbed his pant leg, but the fabric slipped through his fingers. The commander escaped. Just like that, the coup failed. Democracy survived by a thread!
George Bernard Shaw wrote, "Some men see things as they are and ask, 'Why?' I dream things that never were and ask, 'Why not?' " How do we make sense of a world where our existence depends on so many things that could have gone differently? How do we understand ourselves when one person's life is contingent on someone else's death, or where democracy survives by the thread of a pant leg? We have to imagine alternate worlds. What if the Stimsons missed their train? What if the bomber over Kokura had taken off later? What if my great-grandfather had come home early? The world would be different. But *how*?
I'm a disillusioned scientist. I think the world doesn't work the way we pretend it does. We're living a lie, from the stories we tell ourselves to the myths we use to explain history. I think humanity is just struggling to impose order on a chaotic world. But maybe we can find new meaning in that chaos. Maybe we can celebrate it by accepting that we're all just flukes.
That goes against everything I've been taught. Everything happens for a reason, right? But maybe not. Instead, I've realised that lots of different realms of human knowledge - politics, philosophy, economics, biology, geology, anthropology, physics, psychology, neuroscience - can come together and help us understand the puzzle.
When enough puzzle pieces snap together, a fresh image appears, maybe we can replace the lies with something that's closer to the truth, even if that means flipping our whole worldview upside down. We live in crazy times: politics, pandemics, climate change, AI. In a world of rapid change, many of us feel lost in a sea of uncertainty. But the best thing we can do is tell the truth, you know?
The world is more interesting and complex than we think. If we look a little closer, the storybook version of reality might give way to a reality that's defined more by chance and chaos, an arbitrarily intertwined world where every moment counts, no matter how small.
I want to dispel some myths and explore three things: how our species came to be the way it is, how our lives are diverted by events that are beyond our control, and why we misunderstand modern society. Even the tiniest flukes can matter. As Hannah Arendt said, "The smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of boundlessness."
You might be saying, "If the storybook version of reality is a lie, then why is there so much order in our lives?" Many facets of our lives *are* stable. Maybe I'm overstating the case. Maybe most chance events don't matter.
Evolutionary biology has been divided by these two ideas. Does life follow a stable path? Or is it always being diverted by chance and chaos? Biologists frame this as: Is the world contingent or convergent? Does evolution proceed predictably, or can contingencies lead evolution down different paths? It isn't just Darwinian theory, this idea can give us a way of understanding why our own lives and societies take unexpected turns.
If you change one small thing from yesterday, like whether you stopped for coffee, and your day stayed the same, that's a convergent event. The details didn't matter. If you stopped for coffee and *everything* changed, that's a contingent event. So much hinged on one small detail.
The natural world seems to seesaw between contingency and convergence. 66 million years ago, an asteroid hit Earth with the force of 10 billion bombs, it set of clouds of poisonous sulfur into the atmosphere. vast amounts of pulverized rock were also thrown into the atmosphere, creating intense friction that culminated in an “infrared pulse.”
The heat was so great that the survivors were those who could burrow or live in the seas. When we look at animals today, we're seeing the descendants of these asteroid survivors, an arbitrary branch of life largely descended from resourceful diggers.
Change one detail, and we can imagine a completely different world. If the asteroid had hit a moment earlier or later, it would have released far less toxic gas. If the asteroid had been delayed, it might have missed Earth entirely. One astrophysicist has proposed that the asteroid came from disturbances in the sun's orbit. For one small vibration in space, dinosaurs might have survived. That's contingency.
Now, consider our eyes. We have rod and cone cells that let us sense light. That's crucial for survival. But most of Earth's history, animals didn't have eyes. Until a random mutation accidentally created a clump of light-sensitive cells. Those creatures could tell when they were in lighter or darker spaces, which helped them survive. Over time, this was reinforced through evolution. Eventually, we ended up with sophisticated eyes. At first glance, that random mutation seems like another contingent event.
But when researchers looked at creatures that are different from us, like squid and octopus, they discovered something amazing: their eyes are really similar to ours. Octopus and squid eyes emerged independently from a separate but similar mutation. Our evolutionary track and the track of octopuses and squid diverged roughly 600 million years ago, but we ended up with similar eyes. It's not that we all won the species lottery, it's that nature sometimes converges toward the same solution when presented with the same problem. Contingency might change how the discovery happens, but the outcome is similar. Like hitting the snooze button might delay your journey, but not change your life path. You get to the same destination no matter what. That's convergence.
Convergence is the "everything happens for a reason" school of thought. Contingency is the "stuff happens" theory.
If our lives are driven by contingencies, then small things play a huge role. But if convergence rules, then chance events are just curiosities. We can ignore the flukes.
For centuries, we've had faith in convergence. Newton's laws weren't supposed to be broken. Adam Smith wrote of an "invisible hand." Biologists resisted Darwin because he put too much emphasis on random chance. Uncertainty has long been dismissed. Small variations are seen as "noise" we should ignore. Even our famous quotes are infused with the logic of convergence. "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." It doesn't bend at random.
Motoo Kimura challenged that conventional wisdom, insisting that small, random fluctuations matter more than we think. As a kid in the 1920s, he hated school. He was taught in a system that emphasized conformity. Knowledge meant order and certainty. He was curious, but his school was no place for an inquisitive mind. Finally, one teacher encouraged him. He discovered botany. He vowed to devote his life to learning about plants.
Then, his entire family got food poisoning. His brother died. He was stuck at home, recovering. Unable to study plants, he started reading about mathematics, inheritance, and chromosomes. His obsession with plants turned into an obsession with how change is scripted into our genes. His career pivoted on a rotten meal!
He poured over the building blocks of life. He began to suspect that genetic mutations occurred without rhyme or reason. They were often random and meaningless. Whenever a mutation occurred, his predecessors searched for an explanation, a reason. He just shrugged. Some things happen without reasons. Some things just are.
His discoveries reshaped evolutionary biology. But his ideas are broader than that. They can help us understand the complexity of our world and the flukes within it. Maybe not everything happens for a reason. And maybe the smallest changes can produce the biggest effects.
He was also a living example of his own ideas, an advertisement for how arbitrary changes can create contingency. In 1944, he'd set off for university, hoping to avoid being drafted. In August 1945, he was a student at Kyoto University. If Mr. and Mrs. H.L. Stimson had missed their train and vacationed in Osaka instead, Motoo Kimura and his ideas would likely have been obliterated in a blinding flash of atomic light.