A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and Contingency with Sean Carroll

Nov 14, 2020

Episode: 51 //Release Date: November, 5 2020

In this episode of Big Biology, we chat with Sean Carroll, an award-winning scientist, author and educator about his latest book, A Series of Fortunate Events.

Humans are inherently tuned to find patterns in nature. That ability has helped us survive, but can make it hard for us to understand the role of chance in the natural world. .
Sean argues that chance events have had a huge impact on the way Earth looks today. For instance, the asteroid that wiped out all the dinosaurs paved the way for mammals, and ultimately humans. But it could have landed mostly harmlessly in the ocean, or missed the Earth altogether.
Another chance event is the collision of the Indian and Asian tectonic plates which gave rise to the Himalayas. The weathered rock from those mountains acted as a carbon sink, resulting in cold temperatures and eventually an ice age on the planet. Though these events shaped our world dramatically, they depended entirely on random chance.

SUMMARY

In this episode of Big Biology we talk to Sean Carroll about his latest book “A Series of Fortunate Events,” which highlights the role of chance in biology.

We also discussed his journey from prolific scientist to award-winning storyteller. Sean started his book writing career with a topic close to his area of research, “From DNA to Diversity”. Afterwards, he transitioned into writing about more general topics to engage a broader audience. Sean is also a film producer and head of HHMI Tangled Bank Studios. There, his critically acclaimed book “The Serengeti Rules” was adapted into a film, which recently won an Emmy for Outstanding Nature Documentary.!

In Sean’s view, scientists don’t give chance enough credit. Humans seek an explanation for everything we see around us, but many events are chance dependent.

“A majority of Americans, according to polls, believe that everything in life happens for a reason, from conception to death. That is a mindset that really gets challenged by things like cancer, a child born with a disease, or a pandemic. We live in a chance driven world”, says Sean.

Sean starts “A Series of Fortunate Events” with what he deems the “mother of all accidents,” where he writes about the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. The rare survivors of that chance event, only a few small mammals and birds, evolved into the life we know and see around us today.

“We are really looking at a low frequency event that just had to hit a particular place on Earth to set in motion a mass extinction, and had it not happened, life would be entirely different”, says Sean.

Finally, Sean draws parallels between the role of chance in the entertainment industry and in science. Both scientists and comedians have one thing in common: they tell the truth. So how do comedians get away with it, but scientists end up in a controversy?

RESOURCES

Here are links to a few of the resources we talked about on the episode or used to prepare for the interview:

Books

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A Series of Fortunate Events
“Why is the world the way it is? How did we get here? Does everything happen for a reason or are some things left to chance? Philosophers and theologians have pondered these questions for millennia, but startling scientific discoveries over the past half century are revealing that we live in a world driven by chance. A Series of Fortunate Events tells the story of the awesome power of chance and how it is the surprising source of all the beauty and diversity in the living world.”-Sean B Caroll