Is It a Useful Enterprise?

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i'm not saying this wis blind all over the world, i think it's a fact. And in other words, it's a religious truth that's different from an empirical, scientific truth. With regard to climate change, there are things you can go out, but it's not quite the same. I don't think things are necessary always as cut and dried as they are in any sort of science. But because we're just coming out of this covin epidemic, there was a great deal of talk about following the science. Well, what we do know is, to the first approximation, these water tight models produced by a variety of groups in this country were er wrong

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.