A good non-fiction book: pleasant, even entertaining to read. The author writes in stories and is sometimes able to touch me.

The stories I will remember:

The declaration of love to the dragonfly in chapter 6, a beautiful organism for a life in flying, followed by the hint that flies (and thus also mosquitoes) evolved evolutionary-biologically from something similar to the dragonfly. "It was only because evolution is random that this was possible." Which changed my idea about the position of humans in evolution.

The characterization of the mathematician John von Neumann in chapter 8 as someone who regarded selfish thinking as natural law. Now the whole game theory seems to me like a theory of everyone fighting everyone.
J.v.Neumann was then also the one who chose the cities on which the first atomic bombs were dropped and recommended the armament of America with atomic missiles. He served as a model for "Dr. Strangelove or like me learned to love the bomb".

The layout, the notes and the bibliography, all very nicely presented and pleasing.

But as a mathematician and potential gambler I have to nag about the overall concept and only want to give 4 out of 5 stars. The very short explanations about entropy in chapter 3 are not enough for me. A good story could have been possible here, starting with Laplace's principle of indifference and ending with the principle of maximum entropy. The important equilibrium condition of the principle of maximum entropy is missing, and thus all the explanations about life make quite little sense to me.

It is obvious that the author has dealt with brain research in his academic life and that his previous non-fiction publications dealt with questions of evolution, among others.