The Evolution of Everything

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

Thanks largely to Greenblatt’s marvellous book The Swerve,

Hume realised that it was good for society if people were nice to each other, so he thought that rational calculation, rather than moral instruction, lay behind social cohesion.

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

‘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

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

Changing a cake after it has been baked cannot alter the recipe that was used.

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