Animal Minds

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You don't want to say that it's a myth that animals have minds, but they're different. Animals very seldom are spontaneous and sort of just pick up something and wander off and do it for you. But the degree of training is staggering. It will take 50 thousand trials to eventually persuade the animal to do what you want to,. because you can't tell it. The more i've read into this area, the more struck i've been by a whole set of observations about what animals can and cannot do. And we know that the crows in particular show some striking convergences with the human mind.

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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