ABSTRACT
The banns for Alison's and Kalam's marriage were first published in 1608 when the East India Company's ship the Hector had docked at Swally Hole, the natural harbor downriver from Surat in Gujarat. Alison and Kalam were lucky, but not all the stories told by chance have nice happy endings. The direction of the history is toward variety, ever increasing variety achieved by accumulation. As variety grows, so too does the potential for chance to step in and influence events, thus the histories of accumulation and of chance go hand in hand. The pace of accumulation, the accumulation of variety, started to quicken at the start of the sixteenth century, in the last hundred years it reached an unprecedented velocity. When confronted by the inherent variety of individual behavior, the second wave of social theory that clung to the coattails of neo-Darwinist science has been little more successful than the dismal record of Spencer.
