Q. You have written that humankind is an afterthought, a cosmic accident. Why?
A. Only in the sense that every species is. Since evolution has no inherent or predictable direction, if you could play life's tape again from any early point, you would get a completely different result that wouldn't include human beings. In that sense, every species' appearance is not random, because after it happens it is perfectly explainable, but it's unpredictable. The reason I call humans even more of an afterthought than others is that our lineage is so young and so small. The splitting point between human ancestors...