i followed thet kind of gould sagon, you know, its cosmo sagon famously portrayed these giant gas planets like jupiter. He didn't want to show terrestrial like objects. The atmosphere is far too turbulent to allow that sort of thing to happen. There's a ongoing discuss about the habitability of the cloud deck in venus. i love this becausey my instinct is that there isn't any life there, but there are a few strands of evidence which are very, very tantalizing and may yet turn out to be,. But of course, we'll see what happens.
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.