Are They True? Or Is It a Novel?

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i'm just curious, you know, what other thoughtful, intelligent people like yourself think about these things and how they arrive there. Maybe it's more mythological truth i've been kind of plain with this idea of religious truths, political truths, mythological, scientific truths. I was having this conversation with gordan peterson - he's big into mythology and young and and anda and nichi and dostoyovsky. We noe were people who were pushing against a tide which i'm not sure would take us in the direction we wished to be. It's rubbish. Its those myths there are foundational to how we see ourselves in the world. In certain societies, those myths can

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.