Life on Earth is an unfathomable, ever-present, teeming frenzy of billions of legs, knots, thorns, prickles, and teeth—the orgy in which we exist and from which we come. Three and a half billion years it managed without us, and then, in the final moments of history, from the intricate tangle of animals, plants, fungi, and microbes, a human emerges and asks: Who am I, and what is the meaning of my human life?
In his debut book, evolutionary neurobiologist Nikolai Kukushkin reconstructs the world step by step—from inanimate matter to the human mind—in order to find answers in the past of his kind to eternal questions.
It turns out that dinosaurs are to blame for human suffering, that lungs exist thanks to lichens, and that the main event in the life of our ancestors over the last eon was their transformation into worms. “The Sound of One Hand Clapping” is a story of a person and his inner world, containing the entire path from inorganic molecules to the emergence of language—told as if it were a knightly romance or a mythical epic.