Quote:Book One in non-fiction series - The Secrets of Life: From Big Bang to Trump

Why does the gene behave like a hedge fund manager? Why are mutations like a gambling scam? Why does nothing ever become top dog in life and win forever?

Humans only arrived after 99.99% of the time there's been life on earth. So what was here before us? And how did these species, and the evolutionary process that created them, end up with the unpromising creatures that were our ancestors?

In this, the first book of The Secrets of Life quartet, SS O'Connor brings his outsider's, questioning eye to reveal the great forces that lie behind from the laws that arose with Big Bang, through to the 'decisions' that organisms make to determine their chances.

But how did everything come about? And what made some life forms succeed - while others would join the 99.9% of species that appeared, yet went on to become extinct? The story goes right back to our single-celled forebears - the only things that were on the planet for 80% of its existence, and then continues as it lays out the ways that successive transmissions built increasing complexity, and how the resulting species found their synergistic ways of coexisting.