Is It a One Way Story?

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Homo rectus has the run of euroasia for a million years. Do yu you think they would have then developed culture and symbolic communication? Now, with respect, i don't think thatss, i not. I don't want sound ready to. That's quite the question. So should be wrong about you, yes, together or two %. Ae so at yoll deo andonta and wy you gi other. Danas quat, right, you're not excluded that's right. Yes. But as you can see behind me, and with your picture behind you, that all bets are off, yes indeed.

If extraterrestrial intelligences exist, will look anything like us? Are we alone in the cosmos? If we reran the tape of life, would humans appear again? Is there purpose in the cosmos?

Shermer speaks with Cambridge evolutionary palaeobiologist Simon Conway Morris whose latest book challenges six assumptions that too often pass as unquestioned truths amongst the evolutionary orthodox. These include the idea that evolution is boundless in the kinds of biological systems it can produce. Not true, he says. The process is highly circumscribed and delimited. Nor is it random. This popular notion holds that evolution proceeds blindly, with no endgame. But Conway Morris suggests otherwise, pointing to evidence that the processes of evolution are “seeded with inevitabilities.”

Shermer and Morris also discuss: convergent evolution and directionality in evolution; chance, contingency, and law in evolution; theistic evolution and teleology in nature; why Morris is a Christian but rejects Intelligent Design creationism; free will and determinism; and whether there good arguments for God’s existence.