First there is an entity, a single cell, which comes into being within an idyllic pool of ground water. There it is, the first living thing on the planet. It is quite solitary, but it decides to make the best of its situation by creating copies of itself. Over millions of years, these copies bind together and eventually diversify, creating primitive plants and sea creatures. Here we have mollusks, echinoderms, coelenterates, and worms, which feed on the water plants and collectively prefigure every form of modern life. Before long, the most precocious of these sea creatures becomes larger and develops a skeleton.

Some of them grow legs. They crawl out of the muck under a blazing yellow sky and promptly mutate into amphibians, birds, insects, and reptiles. The reptiles do better on land because: a) they stop breathing water altogether; and b) they produce eggs with impenetrable, leathery shells that protect the young-uns from harm. Soon there are dinosaurs and a multitude of small, dog-like mammals. The huge, thundering dinosaurs rule like warlords for awhile, but their hubris gets the better of them when they try to stand up to a meteorite. By this time, Pangaea has been fractured for awhile, and the continents are closer to their current position on the globe.

Then there are the apes. There is something special about the apes.

The brains of some of the apes are getting larger all the time, and their physical features begin to undergo radical changes. Ardipithecus ramidus becomes Australopithecus anamensis, and so on. The apes walk increasingly upright. They exhibit a greater degree of control over their environment. Homo habilis is the first to figure out tools, and the earliest first-aid class begins shortly thereafter. (He has a fairly thick skull, after all.) Homo erectus uses fire, and discovers that steak does not always have to be eaten rare. Homo sapiens is smarter, yet. He constructs self-sustaining civilizations and, judging by the cave drawings, the notion of ars gratis ars.

Based on their instinctive need for social hierarchy, the Homo sapiens maintain that some of them should be more important than others, even though this type of structure is no longer necessary to guarantee their survival. They select some from among themselves based on a number of varying criteria—strength, intelligence, agility, and a pleasing configuration of facial and bodily characteristics. Some of these chosen creatures are given positions of authority or—much later—featured in films and magazines. The less-important creatures spend a lot of time talking about them.

Homo sapiens like to build things to show how important they are, things like pyramids and colossal statues. They learn how to work with bronze, iron, and steel. They split the atom and send delegates to the hunk of rock that is closest to their planet.

Apes have always been quarrelsome, but since they got smart they fight even more. Homo sapiens either fight about Stuff (as the apes always have), or they fight about Ideas. The Ideas are usually about how Stuff should be distributed or about what kind of omniscient being lives in the sky. The Homo sapiens in positions of authority figure out that if they can't provide more Stuff to satisfy their constituents, they can satiate them with Ideas. Some of them believe they have the right to kill other Homo sapiens who do not embrace the same Ideas. Others use Ideas as a means to an end. One in particular initiates a war that is supposed to be about Ideas, but is actually about Stuff. Homo sapiens in other parts of the world think the war is a bad Idea, but he ignores them. Even when this war starts to go wrong, he maintains that the Idea is worth the sacrifice of thousands of Homo sapiens and that his particular omniscient being approves of it all.

All of which is pretty uppity for someone whose ancestors ate pond scum.