Man himself, with his enormous brain, his new convolutions, and his capacity of programming his own computer, is a highly improbable end-result to anticipate. But end-result he is, in our time. The wonder is not so much that man has come out of the slow, slow process of evolution with its chance variations and survival values, but that there should be a universe at all, with its laws and plan and apparent purpose. One suspects that given time unlimited, creation begun on any kindly planet would come to much the same end-result.

Wilder Penfield in his final work, The Mystery of the Mind, 1975.