The Fragile Species: A Forgotten Masterpiece of Perspective on How to Live with Ourselves and Each Other

“We need a better word than chance… To go all the way form a clone of archaebacteria, in just 3.7 billion years, to the B-Minor Mass and the Late Quartets, deserves a better technical term for the record than randomness.”

When Earth first erupted with color, flowers took over so suddenly and completely that, two hundred million years later, the baffled Darwin called this blooming conquest an “abominable mystery.”

When earthlings first realized that our Milky Way is not the cosmic whole but one...