Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.

Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious.

I really enjoy going to a library and spending the day doing research - to me that is the most pleasurable part of writing the science book.

It is a curious feature of our existance that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

Coming back to your native land after an absence of many years is a surprisingly unsettling business, a little like waking from a long coma. Time, you discover, has wrought changes that leave you feeling mildly foolish and out of touch.

Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead.

I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city.