This radical, exciting book draws as much on Darwinian ideas as on Einstein's to propose a way forward beyond theories that can only explain aspects of our universe, towards one that can explain it as a whole. Smolin suggests that the laws of nature are not fixed, but that they evolve in the same way that living things themselves evolve. Effectively, Smolin puts forward the possible unifica-tion of biology and physics, a view of the cosmos which moves beyond both the notion of God and the pessimism of Nietzsche and the existentialists.