2. Humanity's biggest puzzle: the nature of chance and sequence of events.
3. Charles Darwin points to the role played by natural selection in evolution.
4. Genetics Nobel Jacques Monod points to the role of mutations in evolution.
5. Darwin, Monod et al. were fascinated, especially, by the random nature of events.
6. Natural selection and mutations are two of the so many other random happenings.
7. Like asteroids, which circle the sun between Mars and Jupiter, randomly slamming Earth.
8. One such random asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs and paved the way for small mammals.
9. Had it slammed anywhere else other than Mexico, where it did, Earth would've looked different.
10. But since it randomly hit Mexico, onto loads of sulphur and hydrocarbons, it made a kind of Earth.
11. One that's full of soot, sunlight-deflecting aerosols, beauty, complexity, vagaries and variety of life.
12. The biologist Sean Carroll rightly puts that ours is an Earth of random mistakes, governed by chance.
13. Caroll affirms that randomness/chance isn't one among other possible hypotheses, it is the hypothesis.
14. To put it firmly, it is the sole hypothesis, and one that's squares with properly observed and tested facts.
15. So it's okay to accept and live by Ricky Gervais' prickly but true maxim; that we aren't special, just lucky.