Many specialist scientific fields are developing at an incredibly swift rate, but what can they actually tell us about how the universe began and how we humans evolved to play such a dominant role on Earth? John Hands' extraordinarily ambitious quest is to bring together this know ledge and evaluate without bias or preconception all the theories and evidence about the origin and evolution of matter, life, consciousness, and humankind. This astonishing book takes the reader on an unforgettable journey, providing the most comprehensive narrative account yet of current ideas including concepts such as cosmic inflation, dark matter, string theory, the selfish gene and neurogenetic determinism. In the clearest possible prose it differentiates the firmly established from the speculative and examines the claims of various fields such as quantum physics to have achieved (or come close to) a unified theory of everything. In doing so it reveals underlying patterns of cooperation, complexification, and convergence that lead to the unique emergence in humans of a self-reflective consciousness that enables us to determine our future evolution. It thereby challenges elements of orthodox scientific consensus in branches of cosmology, biology, and neuroscience that have ossified into dogma shielded from the requirement of proof. This ground-breaking book is destined to become a classic of scientific thinking.
