The World Is Not as We Think It Is

From the Introduction:
“Know thyself,” the oracle of Delphi urged; but can we truly know ourselves? Can the object of our contemplation gaze into the mirror and see itself objectively?
This book attempts to answer the question of who we are in light of both ancient and modern knowledge, especially the latter. My approach is skeptical, cynical and without consideration for political correctness.
We live in symbiosis with the other forms of life on this planet. Without the amber fields of grain, the fish in the sea, the cows in the meadow, without the bacteria in our guts we would die. Without the oxygen in the air, made available and handed down to us by primeval microorganisms, we would not even exist. The vast wealth that we have today in the developed world we owe to those who have gone before, those who built the cities, the roads, the farms, the homes we live in, the social organizations and the laws we follow.
I also learned that we cannot be understood through a reductive study of our anatomy or through a parsing of our genome. We are more than the atoms in our bodies and more than we can ever know.
No man is an island and we could not be explained to putative aliens in distant worlds without a recognition of all that surrounds us and our connection to all that surrounds us.
So what this book is about is you, especially if you are relatively young and starting out in life. I want you to know now what I have spent decades learning, and I want to present this knowledge unvarnished, unadorned, without euphemism in the hope that you and all that you are connected to might profit from that knowledge.
The main lesson to be learned is that the world is not as we think it is, that we miss most of what is going on around us, and that there is much about ourselves we will never know.