The Evolution of Everything

Life consists of the capacity to reverse the drift towards entropy and disorder, at least locally – to use information to make local order from chaos while expending energy.

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

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.

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.

These happened to be the two regions where the domestication of cattle for milk production was first invented.

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!”’

We know that human innovation rarely designs things from scratch, but jumps from one technology to the ‘adjacent possible’ technology, recombining existing features. So

There has been a decline in violence, not an increase, and it has been fastest in the countries with the least bridled versions of capitalism – not that there is such a thing as unbridled capitalism anywhere in the world.

‘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