No one agrees on how to define complexity, but there's a kind of operational question when it comes to evolutionary biology. When dies, it fit all of the niches that are around it, and wi would stay that way for a hundred million years if you let it. Is that the kind of thing that evolutionary biologists worry about? I hope they don't worry about it. Everybody, and here i use my words, with with lack of suitable care, are interdependent on each other. There's this enormous communication racket going acrossan all the bio sphere.
Evolution by natural selection is one of the rare scientific theories that resonates within the wider culture as much as it does within science. But as much as people know about evolution, we also find the growth of corresponding myths. Simon Conway Morris is a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist who’s new book is From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution. He is known as a defender of evolutionary convergence and adaptationism — even when there is a mass extinction, he argues, the resulting shake-up simply accelerates the developments evolution would have made anyway. We talk about this, and also about the possible role of God in an evolutionary worldview.
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Simon Conway Morris received his Ph.D. in geology from the University of Cambridge. He is currently an emeritus professor of evolutionary paleobiology in the Department of Earth Sciences at Cambridge. Among his awards are the Walcott Medal of the National Academy of Sciences and the Lyell Medal of the Geological Society of London.
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