Are You a Dualist?

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Many of us will, it's in our last years, wi'll have dimentia. But what happens, not infrequently, is they have this so called terminal lucidity. So for the last couple of weeks all their memories come back - almost as you remember him or her. And we would presume that we know when we die, that's it, and that's a great shame. I don't dispute we're completely embodied but i also think, and this is what makes humans so utterly peculiar, is we have this capacity for abstract in which i don't think animals do. E.E. cummings: "I try to keep an open mind"

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.