For example, the chance that certain mutations would occur twice in the same way is inexpressibly small. Natural selection is chance caught on the wing , as Jacques Monod, the French geneticist, phrased it. We, human beings, can count ourselves lucky we exist at all. According to Kauffman, the emphasis which, since Darwin, has been placed on natural selection as a mechanism of evolution, has pushed evolutionist biology too far into the field of historical science. In his opinion, what we have lost sight of is that certain biological processes take place inevitably, just as physical and chemical processes inevitably take place.
Biological processes can also be a-historical.
He is convinced of the importance of such processes in evolution. Perhaps we humans need not be so surprised at having come into existence during the course of evolution. We the expected, we at home in the universe , as Kauffman formulates it. According to Kauffman, one of the processes in which self-organization has probably played a role is the emergence of life. In the pre-biotic environment on Earth, there was probably an ever growing diversity of organic molecules, which, moreover, also became more and more complex.