As the May installment of the magazine came together, I realized that a number of this issue's articles are about patterns. Not just immediately visible ones like the stripes on a zebra, but more subtle cycles that repeat over and over again. Noticing that the world is full of patterns has surely been central to the evolutionary success of human beings. Early cave painters depicted the spotted hides of the animals they hunted. Those hunters no doubt observed how the skins made the animals harder to pick out from the surroundings. They saw that life around them unfolded in generational cycles, and constructed creation myths to deal with what they saw and with what they feared because they could not understand it.
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