Life, The Universe and Everything- Book Review

This is a Douglas Adams book. Therefore, it doesn't have to make sense. And so it doesn't.

Arthur Dent goes on a galactic tour with friends Ford Prefect (we had this car at one time, 1955 make) and Slartibartfast, and they encounter white robots this time instead of mice who conspired to run the universe last time around (in a previous book). They are hell-bent on destroying everything, like a James Bond villain.

The story involves a game of cricket, cave-dwelling, space travel, and everything in between. The wisecracks keep you going, and Zaphod Beeblebrox and his vanishing girlfriend (Half-Girlfriend?) make an appearance too.

Enjoyable if you like completely whimsical stuff of the intergalactic kind. 

Book Review-The Evolution of Everything by Matt Ridley

I am in the middle of a fascinating book about how everything has evolved, and will evolve. No, it does not tell you what will be the end result, but says that it won't be planned. Instead, it will evolve as a result of various events, pulls, pressures and so on. And this covers every aspect of life as we know it.

Almost anything you can think of is covered, not just our evolution from a Darwinian standpoint. Culture, religion, morality, civilisation, institutions, the Law, and almost everything. The central argument of the author is that you can only achieve so much through planning, and free enterprise actually works better than control. Human action helps, but design, planning,...very little.

All you control freaks out there, you need to take a chill pill, if what he argues is even half-correct. For instance, he finds that the Epicurean principles espoused by an ancient author were suppressed a long time because they were inconvenient to, and contradicted the Church. The author's writings were accidentally found and propagated to an extent (or at least were out in print) in the fourteenth century.

Many interesting fields bound together by a common thread. There are references to another book I had read a long time ago, Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, about our evolution.

I can't wait to read the rest of it. See you later.