This week—mostly this, but also a remarkably pleasant interview here, and snovember itself—is reminding me of this wonderful passage I noted in James Gleick’s wondrous book The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood...
‘“Now through the very universality of its structures, starting with the [genetic] code, the biosphere looks like the product of a unique event.... The universe was not pregnant with life, nor the biosphere with man. Our number came up in the Monte Carlo game. Is it any wonder if, like a person who has just made a million at the casino, we feel a little strange and a little unreal?”’
Jacques Monod, Nobel laureate, 1970