The Clap of One Palm: How Inanimate Nature Gave Birth to the Human Mind

Life on Earth — an incomprehensible, ubiquitous, teeming chaos of millions of legs, branches, thorns, and teeth, in which we exist and from which we originate. For three and a half billion years it existed without us, and now, in the last moments of history, from this intricate web of animals, plants, fungi, and microbes emerges man, asking the question: who am I and what is the meaning of my, human, life? In his debut book, evolutionary neurobiologist Nikolai Kukushkin recreates step by step the picture of the world from inanimate matter to the human mind in order to find answers to eternal questions in the past of his species.
It turns out that dinosaurs are responsible for human suffering, lungs exist thanks to lichens, and the main event in the lives of our ancestors over the last eon was their transformation into worms. «The Clap of One Palm» — is a story of man and his inner world, encompassing the entire journey from inorganic molecules to the emergence of language, told as if it were a chivalric romance or a mythical epic.