Were the power given me by some magic means either to visit places I know as they were, say two hundred years ago, or as they will be two hundred years ahead, I would choose the former without hesitation. There would be less shocks: how much pleasanter to see what is now a row of mean, unlovely houses as a wooded lane, than to see what is now an orchard as a huge square block of factory buildings devoted to the manufacture of some chemical substance which enabled us to do without sleep. Two hundred years ago our ancestors would have thought that putting on a headpiece to listen to people talking in America just as absurd an idea as this! Why, less than one hundred years ago, at the beginning of railways in England, a doctor actually wrote a pamphlet to prove that it would be quite impossible to breathe when going through the air at so high a speed as thirty miles an hour!

But tonight you feel lucky. If you leave the table still holding your pot, you could become as rich as Warren Buffett. Somebody has to. Look at Warren Buffett. Evolution involves holding onto your winnings and investing them wisely. You don't even have to know to how to hold onto your winnings. Evolution does it for you; it is the bank in which useful genetic mutations deposit themselves. There is a very slow rate of return, but it's compounded. At the end of one eon, you get your bank statement and find your pittance has grown into an orang utan. At the end of the next eon, it has grown into Charles Darwin. Scientists, at least 99.875 percent of them, believe that in the long run only useful mutations deposit in this bank. Those mutations with no use, or a negative effect, squander their savings in a long-running bunko game, and die forgotten in the gutter.