Chance and happenstance: On the Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Only in imagination, the mathematical imagination, does perfect equality exist. A fair coin has an equal probability of heads and tails, so across many tosses, the expectation is for the proportions to approach 50:50. Laborious demonstrations have shown that this is rarely the case; bias is preloaded into life. Only about 10% of humans are naturally left-handed; a species that is a minority can overwhelm a resident population within a few generations. Economists refer to the ‘Matthew effect’ of the rich getting richer and the Pareto principle, and small accretive effects compounding. This is not just human sociology at work. It has been known since the work of the French chemist Louis Pasteur in 1848 that lifeless molecules can have mirror-image forms, like a left-handed glove and a right-handed glove.