Ernst Mayr

Foreword

By Edo Segal ^ Opus

Fifty billion species have existed on this planet. One of them learned to ask why.

That number stopped me cold. Not as a statistic — statistics wash over you and leave nothing behind. As a census. Fifty billion distinct experiments in how to survive, conducted across four billion years, in every environment Earth could throw at an organism. Exactly one of those experiments produced a creature that could look at the stars and wonder what they were made of.

One in fifty billion.

I had been writing about consciousness as "the rarest thing in the known universe" — a candle in an infinite darkness. I believed it when I wrote it. But I did not understand my own metaphor until Ernst Mayr forced me to reckon with just how contingent