Improbabilities

What happens happened because it was the most probable thing to happen then. Most of the time.

The next now for most average folks is a highly probable, predictable, expected moment, life that continues. Until for some, the unexpectedly improbable outside force strikes directly and life takes a turn. But the surprise doen't always come from beyond.

Errors, mistakes, bad choices and other wrong moves are examples of points where we ourselves are the cause of an unexpected turn of event. Which of course doesn't exclude the improbable - an erroneous assumption leading to real discovery for instance, or a bad turn in an alley... Even the highly improbable can happen - News Of The Weird is full of such demonstrations.

Causality?

My point: In view of the chaotic circumstances of the universe at the time, I'd dare to say that the emergence of life and subsequent self-aware beings resulted from a chain of these highly improbable events. If you consider that reality, at our level, is the gazillion nano-to-mega events required to maintain the consistency of matter, with such numbers improbable things are bound to happen.

But they just rarely do, sitting at the edges of the Bell curve as they are.