A Short History of Nearly Everything

by Bill Bryson

‘They simply exist,’ Attenborough adds, ‘testifying to the moving fact that life even at its simplest level occurs, apparently, just for its own sake.’

‘One of the hardest ideas for humans to accept,’ he says, ‘is that we are not the culmination of anything. There is nothing inevitable about our being here. It is part of our vanity as humans that we tend to think of evolution as a process that, in effect, was programmed to produce us.