The first cockroach genome and its significance for understanding development and the evolution of insect eusociality

“Chance and necessity” (Monod, 1971) appear to be two antagonistic key ingredients in evolution. But which of these is more important or how do they complement each other in the emergence of complex biological traits? In an ideal setting, we would like to discover which scenarios in evolution have been the outcomes of chance (among a set of many alternative scenarios that may well also have been viable) and which scenarios have been selected for under the tight constraints of environmental factors and molecular boundary conditions. In a different phrasing, we would like to understand “What would have been conserved if the tape had run twice” (Fontana & Buss, 1994; Gould, 1989). This is to denote that, given the same starting conditions, we would ask if chance will have a negligible effect on the further trajectories of evolution or if it could lead to fundamentally different systems.