A. Happy Seventieth Birthday to You, Simon Caway

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Simon caway, myris naks are coming on to show and i have to tell you, though, you're still young man. I talked to ernest mayr on his one hundredth birthday, cause i kind of knew him,. so i called him and i said, what ar you doing? Hegoes, on your birthday, goes, i'm working on two books and three papers. And he went on and on like, ok, old boy. Whatare you what? What's neyet? What's next for you? We i've got a couple of technical papers a friend in canada. B, i'm sort of getting mymy mind very slowly

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.