The meteorologist Edward Lorenz famously asked, in the title of a lecture in 1972: “does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?”, and the phrase “the butterfly effect” entered the language. If Steven Johnson’s book How We Got to Now catches on — and it deserves to — then the “humming bird effect” will also become common parlance.
Humming birds exist because flowers needed to find a way to spread pollen over long distances, and they invented nectar to attract insects. Birds were not part of the deal at all until much later. That the evolutionary emergence of flowers would lead to a radical redesign of the anatomy of some birds could not have been foreseen.
