And if we look over our shoulders at the course of evolution that has led to this moment, we’ll see that it’s littered with organisms that certainly didn’t benefit from the mutational chaos that underpins evolution. It turns out nature is less an engineer than a tinkerer, and a fairly sloppy one at that. Its carelessness can seem like outright cruelty for those people unlucky enough to inherit genetic mutations that turned out to be suboptimal.
