Anyone who pays at least cursory attention to the financial markets has surely divined what stock analysts share with meteorologists, evolutionary biologists, astrologers and, heaven knows, political pundits: no one can say with certainty that he has any idea what will happen tomorrow.
That's a big problem, whether you're managing astronomical sums of other people's money or just deciding what to pack for London. It might seem another problem altogether to spend your time reconstructing that fateful period 3.5 billion years ago, when protein molecules dancing through the earth's primordial foam collectively spit forth the first proto-bacteria, life's earliest ancestors. You...