"The minute those two little particles inside a woman's womb have joined together, billions of decisions have been made. A thing like that has to come from entropy"
About this Quote
Stout takes the clinical moment of conception and makes it sound like a cosmic prank: two particles meet, and suddenly the universe is locked into “billions of decisions.” The line works because it’s a bait-and-switch. It begins with the language of biology and inevitability, then swerves into philosophy, implying that life’s seeming design isn’t evidence of a planner but a byproduct of disorder. “A thing like that has to come from entropy” is less science lesson than worldview: the sheer overdetermination of a human life, all those branching choices and contingencies, feels too messy to be authored cleanly. So he credits the mess.
There’s also a sly reversal of the usual rhetorical move. People often point to embryonic development as proof of purposeful order. Stout flips it: the more intricate the chain of consequences, the more it resembles an accident that can’t be reverse-engineered into intention. The sentence “billions of decisions have been made” anthropomorphizes biology, turning chemistry into committee meetings; it’s witty, but it’s also a jab at moral certainty. If everything is set in motion at that first instant, then later claims of control - by parents, by priests, by politicians, even by the self - start to look like retrospective storytelling.
As a mid-century crime writer with a taste for intellectual banter, Stout is channeling a skeptical modernity: the idea that systems (bodies, societies, motives) run on forces that don’t care about our narratives. Entropy here isn’t just physics. It’s a defense against the comforting lie that life’s outcomes were ever cleanly chosen.
There’s also a sly reversal of the usual rhetorical move. People often point to embryonic development as proof of purposeful order. Stout flips it: the more intricate the chain of consequences, the more it resembles an accident that can’t be reverse-engineered into intention. The sentence “billions of decisions have been made” anthropomorphizes biology, turning chemistry into committee meetings; it’s witty, but it’s also a jab at moral certainty. If everything is set in motion at that first instant, then later claims of control - by parents, by priests, by politicians, even by the self - start to look like retrospective storytelling.
As a mid-century crime writer with a taste for intellectual banter, Stout is channeling a skeptical modernity: the idea that systems (bodies, societies, motives) run on forces that don’t care about our narratives. Entropy here isn’t just physics. It’s a defense against the comforting lie that life’s outcomes were ever cleanly chosen.
Quote Details
| Topic | Free Will & Fate |
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