Coincidence that is statistically impossible seems to us like an irrational event, and some define it as a miracle. But, as Montaigne has said, "the origin of a miracle is in our ignorance, at the level of our knowledge of nature, and not in nature itself." Glorious miracles have been later on discovered to be obedience to the laws of nature or a technological development that was not widely known at the time. As the German poet, Goethe, phrased it: "Things that are mysterious are not yet miracles." The miracle assumes the intervention of a "higher power" in its occurrence that is beyond human capability to grasp. Yet there are methodical and simple ways to "cause a miracle" without divine revelation and inspiration. Instead of checking it out, investigating and finding the source of the event, we define it as a miracle. The miracle, then, is the excuse of those who are too lazy to think.

Information encountered after an event can influence subsequent remembering. External information can easily integrate into a witness's memory, especially if the event was poorly encoded or the memory is from a distant event, in which case time and forgetting have degraded the original memory. With reduced information available in memory with which to confirm the validity of post-event misinformation, it is less likely that this new information will be rejected. Instead, especially when it fits the witness's current thinking and can be used to create a story that makes sense to him or her, it may be integrated as part of the original experience. This process can be explicit (i.e., the witness knows it is happening), but it is often unconscious. That is, the witness might find himself or herself thinking about the event differently without awareness. Over time, the witness may not even know the source of information that led to the (new) memory. Sources of misinformation in forensic contexts can be encountered anywhere, from discussions with other witnesses to social media searches to multiple interviews with investigators or other legal professionals, and even in court.

Correlations are powerful because the insights they offer are relatively clear. These insights are often covered up when we bring causality back into the picture. For instance, a used-car dealer supplied data to statisticians to predict which of the vehicles available for purchase at an auction were likely to have problems. A correlation analysis showed that orange-colored cars were far less likely to have defects. Even as we read this, we already think about why it might be so: Are orange-colored car owners likely to be car enthusiasts and take better care of their vehicles? Or, is it because orange-colored cars are more noticeable on the road and therefore less likely to be in accidents, so they're in better condition when resold? Quickly we are caught in a web of competing causal hypotheses. But our attempts to illuminate things this way only make them cloudier. Correlations exist; we can show them mathematically. We can't easily do the same for causal links. So we would do well to hold off from trying to explain the reason behind the correlations.

Most mice in the wild are eaten or die before their life span of two years is over. They die from external causes, such as disease, starvation, or predators, not due to internal causes, such as aging. That is why nature has made mice to live, on average, for no longer than two years. Now we have arrived at an important point: The average life span of an animal species, or the rate at which it ages, is determined by the average time that this animal species can survive in the wild. That explains why a bat can live to be 30 years old. In contrast to mice, bats can fly, which is why they can escape from danger much faster. Thanks to their wings, bats can also cover longer distances and are better able to find food. Every genetic change in the past that made it possible for a bat to live longer was useful, because bats are much better able than mice to flee from danger, find food, and survive.

Moral excellence, according to Aristotle, is the result of habit and repetition, though modern science would also suggest that it may have an innate, genetic component. This means that moral excellence will be broadly set early in our lives, which is why the question of how early to teach it is so important. Freud suggested that we don't change our personality much after age five or thereabouts, but as in many other things, Freud was wrong. Recent psychological research shows that personality traits stabilize around age thirty in both men and women and regardless of ethnicity as the human brain continues to develop, both neuroanatomically and in terms of cognitive skills, until the mid-twenties. The advantage of this new understanding is that we can be a bit more optimistic than Aristotle and Freud about being able to teach moral excellence.

The size of a species is not accidental. It's a fine-tuned interaction between a species and the world it inhabits. Over large periods of time, size fluctuations have often signalled significant changes in the environment. Generally speaking, over the last five hundred million years, the trend has been towards animals getting larger. It's particularly notable in marine animals, whose average body size has increased 150-fold in this time. But we are beginning to see changes in this trend. Scientists have discovered that many animals are shrinking. Around the world, species in every category have been found to be getting smaller, and one major cause appears to be the heat. Animals living in the Italian Alps, for example, have seen temperatures rise by three to four degrees Celsius since the 1980s. To avoid overheating, chamois goats now spend more of their days resting rather than searching for food, and as a result, in just a few decades, the new generations of chamois are 25 percent smaller.

For a long time, random sampling was a good shortcut. It made analysis of large data problems possible in the pre-digital era. But much as converting a digital image or song into a smaller file results in loss of data, information is lost when sampling. Having the full (or close to the full) dataset provides a lot more freedom to explore, to look at the data from different angles or to look closer at certain aspects of it. A fitting example may be the light-field camera, which captures not just a single plane of light, as with conventional cameras, but rays from the entire light field, some 11 million of them. The photographers can decide later which element of an image to focus on in the digital file. There is no need to focus at the beginning, since collecting all the information makes it possible to do that afterwards. Because rays from the entire light field are included, it is closer to all the data. As a result, the information is more "reuseable" than ordinary pictures, where the photographer has to decide what to focus on before she presses the shutter.

Introverted leaders do have to overcome the strong cultural presumption that extroverts are more effective leaders. Although the population splits into almost equal parts between introverts and extroverts, more than 96 percent of managers and executives are extroverted. In a study done in 2006, 65 percent of senior corporate executives viewed introversion as a barrier to leadership. We must reexamine this stereotype, however, as it doesn't always hold true. Regent University found that a desire to be of service to others and to empower them to grow, which is more common among introverts than extroverts, is a key factor in becoming a leader and retaining leadership. So-called servant leadership, dating back to ancient philosophical literature, adheres to the belief that a company's goals are best achieved by helping workers or customers achieve their goals. Such leaders do not seek attention but rather want to shine a light on others' wins and achievements; servant leadership requires humility, but that humility ultimately pays off.

By the nineteenth century, France had developed a system of precisely defined units of measurement to capture space, time, and more, and had begun to get other nations to adopt the same standards. Just half a century later, in the 1920s, the discoveries of quantum mechanics forever destroyed the dream of comprehensive and perfect measurement. And yet, outside a relatively small circle of physicists, the mindset of humankind's drive to flawlessly measure continued among engineers and scientists. In the world of business it even expanded, as the precision-oriented sciences of mathematics and statistics began to influence all areas of commerce. However, contrary to the trend of the past several decades, in many new situations that are occurring today, allowing for imprecision ― for messiness ― may be a positive feature, not a shortcoming. As a tradeoff for relaxing the standards of allowable errors, one can get a hold of much more data. It isn't just that "more is better than some," but that, in fact, sometimes "more is greater than better."

Multiple laboratory studies show that cooperative people tend to receive social advantages from others. One way to demonstrate this is to give people the opportunity to act positively or negatively toward contributors. For example, Pat Barclay, a professor at the University of Guelph, had participants play a cooperative game where people could contribute money toward a group fund which helped all group members, and then allowed participants to give money to other participants based on their reputations. People who contributed more to the group fund were given responsibility for more money than people who contributed less. Similar results have been found by other researchers. People who contribute toward their groups are also chosen more often as interaction partners, preferred as leaders, rated as more desirable partners for long-term relationships, and are perceived to be trustworthy and have high social status. Uncooperative people tend to receive verbal criticism or even more severe punishment. Studies suggest that individuals who act with generosity toward their communities are more likely to be viewed as deserving of benefit by members of that community than those who don't.