The Burgess Shale, a 'Cathedral'

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Ive. Goen to the bgs, burgess shale. I went to a canada for a conference that a friend of mine, greghart, was putting on. We got to talking about gould's book, and he said, you know, the burgess shale is just a couple o hours drive from here,. And i thought, oh my god. But we did it all in one day, up and back. In parenthesis. The actual quality of preservation is a little bit disgusting tho difference tween raphael and leonardo de vinci.

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.