Specialist scientific fields are developing at incredibly swift speeds, but what can they really tell us about how the universe began and how we as humans evolved to play such a dominant role on Earth? John Hands' extraordinarily ambitious book merges scientific knowledge from multiple disciplines and evaluates without bias or preconception all the theories and evidence about the origin and evolution of matter, consciousness, and mankind. In the clearest possible prose it differentiates the firmly established from the speculative and examines the claims of various fields to approach a unified theory of everything. In doing so, it challenges the orthodox consensus in those branches of cosmology, biology, and neuroscience that have ossified into dogma. This groundbreaking book is destined to become a classic of scientific thinking.
