Universality means that at a system's critical point, its detailed physical properties do not matter to its behavior.

“At that critical point when all the forces are poised and the system is right on that delicate balance between being organized, highly organized, or being totally disorganized, it turns out that almost none of the physical details about that system matter to how it behaves.”

The emergence of cumulative culture in humans is a highly contingent event that cannot be predicted by biology alone.

“That is the signature of contingency in macro evolution. And you see that in in lots of cases like in the history of life like where it takes an enormous amount of time for some innovation to suddenly pop out.”