George Clooney has claimed that France should return the Mona Lisa to Italy during a promotional tour for his new film The Monuments Men, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

The comments, which follow Clooney's repeated claims over the past week that Britain should return the Parthenon marbles to Greece, were reportedly made in Milan at a press event during which the film's cast posed in front of the famed Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece The Last Supper. The film's director was joined by co-stars Matt Damon, Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, Jean Dujardin and John Goodman for the event.

Da Vinci's Mona Lisa is currently held in the Louvre in Paris, where it has hung since 1797. It was acquired by French king Francis I shortly after completion around 1518 and has only been shown in Italy once, in 1913, following its theft by an Italian patriot in 1911.

Italian authorities have regularly petitioned for the return of the world's most famous painting, most recently in 2012 ahead of the 100th anniversary of its restitution to France. Their Gallic counterparts have so far refused on the grounds that the work of art is too delicate to be moved. Clooney's reported remarks are said to have returned the matter to the public arena and sparked new calls in Italy for the return of the painting.

The book is about evolution, its messiness, glory, sometimes cruelty, and awesome power to create more and more complexity. Darwinian processes, driven by variation, selection, and replication, are fundamental cosmic patterns found not only in biological life but also in the evolution of cultures, technologies, and societies. The only permanent feature of an ever changing universe is the process of change itself. Evolution works by creating complexity and diversity, in an endless search of better adaptation to changing environmental conditions, and ruthlessly discarding experiments to make room for what works. "Natural selection is a process of exuberant creation and ruthless elimination," says Chu. "Similarly, the best practice in science and culture is a kind of negative pragmatism: find out what is not working and get rid of it."

It's not surprising, then, that the most successful product of evolution - ourselves - must necessarily make room for new experiments in the search of optimal adaptation to a wider environment - the whole universe. Chu uses the powerful metaphor of a killer whale - another creature that evolution has placed at the top of its habitat - that jumps out of the water to catch glimpses of other, more challenging alien environments. At this point in human history, "blind" Darwinian evolution is about to give rise to self-directed, conscious evolution. But self-directed evolution will not be a clean, aseptic, top-down, design-review-implementation project.