Are you one of those people who think that life is just a struggle for existence... where the strongest win by being bloodier in tooth and claw than the competition? Well, think again, argues SS O'Connor in The Secrets of Life: From Big Bang to Trump. By dividing the story into four books, The Secrets of Life unfolds how life came to exist on earth in an approachable style, without case histories or references, footnotes or even an index. Its aim is to fascinate the reader, keeping attention high by imagining their questions and objections, and then answering them. It shows how all of life's strategies have flaws that can be exploited, and that nothing is ever truly secure or able to survive forever. And yet the effect of all his failure is to make life itself immortal. A successful venture capitalist by background, O'Connor sets out to use the same analytical skills he employed in his business life to condense down the gigantic mass of genetic, biological, anthropological, game theoretic and historical evidence into a highly readable narrative that shows that it's non-zero collaboration that wins in life. Aimed at general readers like himself, he recognises that life may appear as an endless and violent conflict, yet under the obvious requirement to take one another's energy, there's always been a deeper current that's driving living things to higher and higher levels of cooperation. What does this mean? Well, the series' contention is that if one sets received wisdom to one side and really digs into the facts, there are actually very few 'secrets' in life. Rather, it's possible to see that from the split second of Big Bang, right up to our present attempts to make the world a better place, everything that's alive has been trying to find strategies to survive the iron Laws of Thermodynamics, to work together to make more from less, and therefore to overcome the constant threat of destructive, entropic forces. And so, he says, everywhere one looks across the long history of life, from chemical compounds to cellular interactions, and from symbioses to the counter-intuitive power of altruism, survival and success have always come from the creation of win/win solutions. In an easy-going, conversational style ('If I can understand it, then so can you') O'Connor reveals that from the point that life first sparked off some 3.8 billion years ago, every living thing has descended from the original cell by taking blind mutational and genetic 'decisions'. While it's generally agreed that this has led to 99.9% of species eventually becoming extinct, the only certainty is that if something's alive today then it's descended from ancestors who'd managed to reproduce. What we can see around us must therefore be the result of successful strategies. But what are these? And what were the lessons we humans inherited when the Homo genus came along... after 99.995% of the time there'd been life on earth? If this evolution has a direction, then where's it leading us?