Are You Going to Make the Same Kind of Leap That Alfred Russell Wallace Did?

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Willoughby: We're using a linguistic placeholder to describe what the brain does. You have this kind of conceptual gap between neural correlates of consciousness, like patience and a coma or whatever. And i'm not sure what the possible answer could that for that could be because youre yu're your you're taking a conceptual leap. I can only infer that you have feelings like i have feelings, cause i see clues about it, and so on. That's the best we could do. But if i said that the mind is the word, mind is just a word. Nd this still remains something of a mystery. Willoughby: There's a part at actualy this stage

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.