I like teaching one example of Brownian motion, because it undermines myths of how genes determine everything interesting in living systems. Take a fertilized egg. When it divides in two, there is random Brownian splitting of the stuff floating around inside, such as thousands of those powerhouses-of-the-cell mitochondria—it’s never an exact 50:50 split, let alone the same split each time. Meaning those two cells already differ in their power-generating capacity. Same for vast numbers of copies of proteins called transcription factors, which turn genes on or off; the uneven split of
...more

