People talk about human intelligence as the greatest adaptation in the history of the planet. It is an amazing and marvelous thing, but in evolutiona… - Stephen Jay Gould

"My potential salvation...must remain an unswerving commitment to treat generality only as it emerges from little things that arrest us and open our eyes with "aha" — while direct, abstract, learned assaults upon generalities usually glaze them over."

The divine tape player holds a million scenarios, each perfectly sensible. Little quirks at the outset, occurring for no particular reason, unleash cascades of consequences that make a particular future seem inevitable in retrospect. But the slightest early nudge contacts a different groove, and history veers into another plausible channel, diverging continually from its original pathway. The end results are so different, the initial perturbation so apparently trivial.

But our strong desire to identify trends often leads us to detect a directionality that doesn’t exist, or to infer causes that cannot be sustained. The subject of trends has inspired and illustrated some of the classic fallacies in human reasoning. Most prominently, since people seem to be so bad at thinking about probability and so prone to read pattern into sequence of events, we often commit the fallacy of spotting a “sure” trend in speculating about causes, when we observe no more than a random string of happenings.