“It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change." Charles Darwin

“Every living thing is, from the cosmic perspective, incredibly lucky simply to be alive. Most, 90 percent and more, of all the organisms that have ever lived have died without viable offspring, but not a single one of your ancestors, going back to the dawn of life on Earth, suffered that normal misfortune. You spring from an unbroken line of winners going back millions of generation, and those winners were, in every generation, the luckiest of the lucky, one out of a thousand or even a million. So however unlucky you may be on some occasion today, your presence on the planet testifies to the role luck has played in your past." Daniel Dennett

“The evolution of complex life, its very existence in a universe obeying physical laws is wonderfully surprising, or would be, up for the fact that surprise is an emotion that can exist only in a brain which is the product of that very surprising process. Our existence is desperately surprising. Natural selection produces living organisms which are entities of gigantic but not infinite probability. On one planet, and possibly only one planet in the entire universe, molecules which would normally would made nothing more complicated than a chunk of rock, have some how manage to gather them selves together into chunks of rock size matter, capable in some cases of thinking and feeling and falling in love yet other chunks of complex matter. What we see of the real world, in a sense is not the unvarnished real world, but a model of the real world regulated and adjusted by sense data, but constructed so is useful for dealing with real world. The nature of the model in our head depends of the kind of animal we are.” Richard Dawkins