COSMOSAPIENS

This groundbreaking book is destined to become a classic of scientific thinking.

Many specialist scientific fields are developing at an incredibly swift rate, but what can they actually tell us about how the universe began and how we humans evolved to play such a dominant role on Earth? John Hands's extraordinarily ambitious quest is to bring together this knowledge and evaluate, without bias or preconception, all the theories and evidence about the origin and evolution of matter, life, consciousness, and humankind.

This astonishing book takes the reader on an unforgettable journey, providing the most comprehensive narrative account yet of current ideas including concepts such as cosmic inflation, dark matter, string theory, the selfish gene and neurogenetic determinism. In the clearest possible prose it differentiates the firmly established from the speculative and examines the claims of various fields such as quantum physics to have achieved (or come close to) a unified theory of everything.

In doing so, it reveals underlying patterns of cooperation, complexification, and convergence that lead to the unique emergence in humans of a self-reflective consciousness that enables us to determine our future evolution. It thereby challenges elements of orthodox scientific consensus in branches of cosmology, biology, and neuroscience that have ossified into dogma shielded from the requirement of proof.

John Hands has devoted the last ten years to evaluating scientific theories about human evolution from the origin of the cosmos. He graduated in chemistry from the University of London where he was the first undergraduate President of the Union. He co-authored two research studies and published one non-fiction book in the social sciences, and was appointed founding Director of the UK government's Co-operative Housing Agency. He has served on three government committees. Subsequently John tutored in both physics and in management studies for the Open University. He has also written three novels and been published in eight countries, and was Royal Literary Fund Fellow at University College London.