There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic… - Richard Dawkins

The river of my title is a river of DNA, and it flows through time, not space. It is a river of information, not a river of bones and tissues.

"‎"Matter flows from place to place, and momentarily comes together to be you. Some people find that thought disturbing; I find the reality thrilling.

And the beauty of the anthropic principle is that it tells us, against all intuition, that a chemical model need only predict that life will arise on one planet in a billion billion to give us a good and entirely satisfying explanation for the presence of life here.