A big-picture look at how human life emerged and evolved in the universe, incorporating the ideas of world-renowned experts from a wide range of intellectual disciplines. Here, John Hand sifts the speculative from the firmly established, examining claims of all sorts, challenging the orthodox consensus in those branches of cosmology, biology, and neuroscience that have ossified into dogma. In the end, his striking analysis reveals underlying patterns of cooperation, complexity, and convergence that begin to tell the story of human emergence and consciousness.