I live and work alone and travel light, relying largely on my memory and making a point of letting intuition guide my way.

Life arose by order out of chaos and maintains this order by collecting information from the cosmos. Cosmic forces bombard earth all the time, but the movement of celestial bodies and the movement of earth in relation to these bodies produces a pattern that provides useful information. Life is sensitive to this pattern because it contains water, which is unstable and easily influenced. Which.

Life keeps time, and it seems that the beat is an old one, determined mainly by the rotation of our own planet, which turns the sun on and off like some giant cosmic strobe light. Life.

War-waging and peace-making are as old as ants and apes.

Which means that living things are involved in an open dialogue with the universe, a free exchange of information and influence that unites all life into one vast organism that is itself part of an even larger dynamic structure. There is no escaping the conclusion that the basic similarity in structure and function are ties that bind all life together and that man, for all his special features, is an integral part of this whole.

We survive by controlling our environment, and control is made possible by information. So lack of information quickly breeds insecurity and a situation in which any information is regarded as better than none.

A rose is a rose, but it is also a robin and a rabbit.

The limits of sensory evolution in fish are defined very largely by their habitat. Water is physically supportive, carries some kinds of odour well, and is kind to sound – letting it travel several times faster than air will allow, but it inhibits other more personal kinds of communication.

If elephants didn’t exist, you couldn’t invent one. They belong to a small group of living things so unlikely they challenge credulity and common sense.

If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn’t.