Life is short, and you’ve got a lot to learn. Here are a few good places to start.

My son turned 1 the other day.

vine.co

His name's William; we call him Billy. That video is him on his birthday.

It's a strange thing, because he's barely begun to exist and yet he's already about 1% of the way through the time he'll exist for. He hasn't even learned to speak yet, but he's going to have to learn so much so quickly. It seems unfair. So I thought I'd write down a few things that he ought to know about the world.

So here goes, Billy. 1. You are an animal. Your great-X-grandparents were a sort of ape.

On your mother's side, obviously. ONLY JOKING.

Reuters / Chaiwat Subprasom

Imagine that you're holding hands with your mum, my wife. She's standing to your left. To her left, she's holding hands with her mother. To her left, her mother, and so on. You'd only have to walk about 350km, about the distance from London to Rochdale, before you'd bump into our common ancestor with chimpanzees. She would probably be hairy, squat, mainly quadripedal: very much like a chimp, in fact, although actually no more closely related to chimps than she is to you. You'd have been walking past things that were more like apes than humans for 100km or more. And at no point would there have been a break: Every daughter would have been the same species as her mother. The only reason that we think of "chimps" and "humans", and for that matter "fish" and "fungi" and "beech trees", as different groups is because all the ones in between are dead.

Humans are not separate from the rest of life. Every living thing is, literally, your (admittedly distant) cousin.

View Entire List ›