CONCEPT
Chance and the Specificity of the Moment
The evolutionary insight that specific outcomes — of species, of civilizations, of AI systems — are shaped by contingent events whose recurrence cannot be assumed and whose generalization risks confusing a local trajectory with a universal trend.
Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote in 1973 that "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." The statement became a maxim. It is also a claim about the kind of explanation biological phenomena require: every biological fact is the product of a historical process governed by selection and by chance. Mayr insisted on this with a specificity that distinguished his position from both naive adaptationism (every trait is an optimal solution) and naive randomism (everything is arbitrary). Natural selection is a real and powerful force, but it operates in a context shaped by chance events — genetic drift, founder effects, environmental accidents — that selection itself does not control. The specific configuration of life that exists could not have been derived from first principles, and neither can the specific configuration of AI that exists in 2026.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The mechanisms of chance