Fluke

 

Brian Klass, “Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and why Everything We Do Matters,” Scribner, 2024, 264 pp.

If you could rewind your life to the very beginning and then press play, would everything turn out the same? Or could making an accidental phone call or missing an exit off the highway change not just your life, but history itself? And would you remain blind to the radically different possible world you unknowingly left behind?

 

In Fluke, myth-shattering social scientist Brian Klaas dives deeply into the phenomenon of random chance and the chaos it can sow, taking aim at most people's neat and tidy storybook version of reality. The book's argument is that we willfully ignore a bewildering truth: but for a few small changes, our lives--and our societies--could be radically different.

 

Offering an entirely new lens, Fluke explores how our world really works, driven by strange interactions and apparently random events. How did one couple's vacation cause 100,000 people to die? Does our decision to hit the snooze button in the morning radically alter the trajectory of our lives? And has the evolution of humans been inevitable, or are we simply the product of a series of freak accidents?

Drawing on social science, chaos theory, history, evolutionary biology, and philosophy, Klaas provides a brilliantly fresh look at why things happen--all while providing mind-bending lessons on how we can live smarter, be happier, and lead more fulfilling lives.

My Notes:

Pg. 39:  Two billion years ago on Earth a single bacterium bumped into a prokaryotic cell and ended up inside it.  That bacterium eventually evolved into a mitochondrion, the powerhouse of our cells.  In that instant, everything changed.  Every future species of complex life—from trees to grass and snails to humans—owes its existence to the unexpected microbial merger.  It’s unsettling that the entirety of the human saga can be traced back to a microscopic accident.  It happened just once two billion years ago—and never again since.  It is perhaps the greatest fluke of all time. (Note: Earth is 3.7 billion years old; the Universe is 13.7 billion years old).

Pg. 59:  Humans underwent a severe population bottleneck tens of thousands of years ago (possibly multiple times).*  One study concluded that at one point, as few as one thousand human breeding pairs existed. 

*Some bottlenecks proposed by researchers such as one associated with the Toba volcano, remain controversial.  It’s uncertain precisely how many bottlenecks occurred or how severe they were.

Pg. 81:  In 1875, a plague of locusts the size of California swept across the US, devouring everything in its path.  The locusts spread across the fertile plains, up to Minnesota and down to Texas.  An estimated 3.5 trillion insects formed a cloud eighteen hundred miles long.  Locusts’ plagues ravaged America for several more years.

Pg. 102f:  Many communication technologies throughout history have been transformative.  But the printing press, newspapers, radio transmissions and TV broadcasts all expanded the number of people who could consume information.  The internet is fundamentally different.  It’s a revolution that has for the first time in history created an explosion in who can create widely disseminated information.  It’s a fundamental shift from few-to-many communication to many-to-many communication.  Ideas are the main motors of change in human cultures and the pace of change is a function of the mutual accessibility of ideas.  That motor of change is now in overdrive.

Pg. 143:  Britain was cut off from the European mainland eight thousand years ago, when an enormous landslide in Norway triggered a world-changing tsunami, creating an island from seas that had been steadily rising since the end of the last great ice age.

Pg. 177:  Despite mountains of evidence backing evolutionary theory, just 54 percent of Americans agree that human beings as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals. 

Pg. 198:  The Replication Crisis of social-psychology:  Of one hundred influential experiments published in prominent psychology journals: Only thirty-six passed the test.