This week's Nobel in chemistry went to two scientists who spent decades chasing why life only uses one "molecular handedness" when chemistry allows for both.

Mix the ingredients for amino acids in a lab and you get a dead-even split, left-handed and right-handed versions in equal numbers. Every living thing on Earth only uses the left-handed kind. Kagan and Soai showed how that happens: a tiny random imbalance, fractions of a percent, starts catalyzing more of itself. Once one version has the slightest edge, it snowballs into near-total dominance.

I think about that every time I open a design system that's drifted. Nobody decided the whole site would end up with one specific border radius on every card. Someone used it once, early, before anyone agreed on a rule. The next person copied the nearest existing component instead of starting fresh. Now there's no vote left to take, just a hundred instances of one choice that happened to come first.

What's the one token in your design system nobody remembers actually deciding on?