“The divine tape recorder 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 feature 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.”

— Stephen Jay Gould , book Wonderful Life

Source: Wonderful Life (1989), pp. 320–321

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Stephen Jay Gould 274

American evolutionary biologist 1941–2002

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Stephen Jay Gould 274

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