The Gap Is Real

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I've followed the animal language debates for decades. I think the gap as real. It's huge. But if you take some concept like dan dennet's degrees of freedom, and his book, a freedom evolves, hemit, argues for the compatibles free will position. And indeed, any one of these explanations and their whole set which are sort of parall in one way ond another is equally convincing. Each one is untestable. O, you knowiti, i wouldn't be so rude as to say they're just so stories, but because we can never ask the chimpansy what they're thinking,. regrettably - only we can sympathize that little

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.