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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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!”’

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