Is There a in a Lan Vital?

6min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

i'm profoundly interested in fact that we are no longer animals. There iss what has been called the gap, to use em a chap called thomas sudendorf. Animals do all sorts of clever and intelligent things - but they don't speak. And these anthropologists who will tell both of us what actually happened would be linguists as well,. But by and large, they don't use one tool to make another tool. They learn, of course they do. The firmi powd sumboly here's we're missing a point on this. i suspect michael shermer will not agree with me about consciousness. I just had david chameson, and i don't think

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.