Three factors, I think, might be at play: 1. Parallelism. The number of all sorts of organisms going through mutations is large. Like 10^40 kind of large. 2.

Three factors, I think, might be at play: 1. Parallelism. The number of all sorts of organisms going through mutations is large. Like 10^40 kind of large. 2. Time. This has been going on at a very rapid tempo for quite a while. 3. Evolutionary pressure. In every generation, harmful mutations are radically weeded out so your search space is dramatically reduced at each generation. While the first two could be roughly estimated, the third one involves non-linearity very sensitive to estimation errors. So I don’t think anybody can _prove_ this is how we ended up with Angela Merkel but it’s not implausible either and nobody has a better idea