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

Richard Dawkins compares the progression through these grades to climbing a mountain (Mount Improbable) and at no point encountering a slope too steep to surmount. Mountains must be climbed from the bottom up. He shows that there are numerous such mountains – different kinds of eyes in different kinds of animal, from the compound eyes of insects to

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

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

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

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.

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.

At the subatomic level, the world turned out to be very far from Newtonian, with uncertainty built into the very fabric of matter.

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.