Is It a Parachute?

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Douglas Bader was based at a local airfield which was used in the second world war. The spit fires were sold to the irish air force, and they put in an extra cockpit for training purposes. So they pop you in in the back cockpit a and you got jeel controls, and you're technical allowed to touch them. You also have a thing you're sitting on, which looks like a cushion,. Butat the top of the cushion, on your think it's got a rip cord. And i've ad you puck a quarter tachni, a quarter irish, so i think i can get away with is. It's ono been, perhaps an a

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.