The Evolution of Everything

Surplus energy is indispensable to modern society, and is the symptom of wealth.

He was saying that the only way to understand organisms was to see them as mortal and temporary vehicles used to perpetuate effectively immortal digital sequences written in DNA. A

the diagnostic feature of life is that it captures energy to create order.

He contrasted skyhooks with cranes – the first impose a solution, explanation or plan on the world from on high; the second allow solutions, explanations or patterns to emerge from the ground up, as natural selection does.

the parsimony principle of using as simple an explanation as possible.

Leave the last word on the anthropic principle to Douglas Adams: ‘Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, “This is an interesting world I find myself in – an interesting hole I find myself in – fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, may have been made to have me in it!”’

Again and again, we have told ourselves that there is a top–down description of the world, and a top–down prescription by which we should live.

‘IN ORDER TO MAKE A PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL MACHINE, IT IS NOT REQUISITE TO KNOW HOW TO MAKE IT.’ To which Daniel Dennett, who is fond of this quotation, replies: yes, indeed! That

Baldwin effect. A species that over many generations repeatedly exposes itself to some experience will eventually find its offspring selected for a genetic predisposition to cope with that experience.