How did life on Earth get started? Can we duplicate human thought in a computing machine? How do children acquire language? In 1990, in his book Paradigms Lost, John L. Casti looked at the state of play with these and a handful of other eternal questions, outlining the competing answers on offer and describing the scientists who advocated them. In this volume, Casti recounts the huge leaps science has made since then, and how new theories and candidate answers have emerged for almost all the big questions.