George Armitage Miller lived in a world of words. Every object that fell into his vision and every word he heard instantly set off a cascade of associations, synonyms, and antonyms that flashed through his mind. A psychologist with an interest in understanding the cognitive processes behind language and information processing, he founded the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard. And, in 1980, long before digital networks were part of everyday life, he was the driving force behind the development of Wordnet, a still functioning online database that details the myriad lexical relationships between most words in the English language.

But for a while in 1983 he was stuck looking for a word to describe the relationship between living organisms and information. A fan of Erwin Schrödinger’s What Is Life, Miller was certain that Schrödinger had left something important out of his definition of life. In order for living organisms to consume free energy per entropy’s demands, Miller insisted, they had to be able to find it, and to find it they had to have the ability to acquire, interpret, and then respond to useful information about the world around them. It meant, in other words, that a significant proportion of the energy they captured was expended seeking out information using their senses and then processing it in order to find and capture more energy.

One aim is to reveal how our relationship to work —in the broadest sense—is more fundamental than that imagined by the likes of Keynes. The relationship between energy, life, and work is part of a common bond we have with all other living organisms, and at the same time our purposefulness, our infinite skillfulness, and ability to find satisfaction in even the mundane are part of an evolutionary legacy honed since the very first stirrings of life on earth.

Davy’s inaugural lecture enthralled many, including Mary Shelley. Years later, in Frankenstein, she was to model Professor Waldman’s lecture on chemistry rather closely on some of Davy’s words. (Specifically, when, speaking of galvanic electricity, Davy had said, “A new influence has been discovered, which has enabled man to produce from combinations of dead matter effects which were formerly occasioned only by animal organs.”) And Coleridge, the greatest talker of his age, always came to Davy’s lectures, not only to fill his chemical notebooks but, as he said, “to renew my stock of metaphors.

I do not think my experience is unique. Many scientists, no less than poets or artists, have a living relation to the past, not just an abstract sense of history and tradition but a feeling of companions and predecessors, ancestors with whom they enjoy a sort of implicit dialogue. Science sometimes sees itself as impersonal, as “pure thought,” independent of its historical and human origins. It is often taught as if this were the case. But science is a human enterprise through and through, an organic, evolving, human growth, with sudden spurts and arrests, and strange deviations, too. It grows out of its past but never outgrows it, any more than we outgrow our childhoods.

It is not clear whether life has to “advance,” whether evolution must take place, if there is a satisfactory status quo. Brachiopods, lampshells, for instance, have remained virtually unchanged since they first appeared in the Cambrian period, more than five hundred million years ago. But there does seem to be a drive for organisms to become more highly organized and more efficient in retaining energy, at least when environmental conditions are changing rapidly, as they were before the Cambrian. The evidence indicates that the first primitive anaerobes on Earth were prokaryotes: small, simple cells—just cytoplasm, usually bounded by a cell wall, but with little if any internal structure.