Hens try to hatch golf balls, whales get beached. Getting things wrong seems to play a fundamental role in life on Earth
is professor of philosophy at the University of Reading in the UK. His latest book is The Metaphysics of Good and Evil (2020) and he is currently writing a book on biological mistakes.
We forget where we parked. We misplace our keys. We misread instructions. We lose track of the time. We call people by the wrong name. ‘To err is human,’ as the English poet Alexander Pope wrote in his Essay on Criticism (1711). But it is not exclusively human. All animals do things that prevent them from surviving, reproducing, being safe, or being happy. All animals get things wrong. Think of a fish that takes the bait and accidentally bites into a metal hook. Think of dogs that forget where they have buried their bones, or frogs that aim their tongues in the wrong direction. Birds build flimsy nests. Whales beach themselves. Domestic hens try to hatch golf balls.
But not everything in the Universe can make mistakes. While living things navigate a world filled with biological errors, the fundamental building blocks of the cosmos adhere to the laws of physics with unwavering consistency. No one ever caught an electron erring, let alone an atom, a sodium ion, a lump of gold, a water droplet or a supernova. The objects that physicists study, the pure objects of physics, do not make mistakes. Instead, they follow ineluctable laws.
