The Amuamua Mua Gai

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We're likely not the very first technological, communicating, intelligent species. So there must be those ahead of us. You could ad somebody that's billions of years ahead of they've had plenty of time. We should have a signal for them by now,. avi lob at a harvard on part of his galileo project team. On enough you followd that the amuamua is a i artefect of an exraterrestrial civilization. But he makes the point that we won't know if we don't look. There's another story, ther's not a clue why they're putting feathers round the head in dogs. And a dog just wants to eat my dinner,

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.