Is There Something More About Darwin?

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He seemed in his lifetime, and maybe this is true for anybody that's becomes famous, and it just becomes a big target. But i think he wanted to go beyond darwinism. He felt extraordinarily strongly, and here i wouldn't disagree with him, that we can't be victims of our evolutionary history. We have to have free will. That might have a bear on some of the things i'm writing at the moment. The whole thing didn't quite work. Ultimately, you know, you'd beter do all the things you'd hope to do, and you fail to convince the number of people you'd like to convince. So there we go. I it is somehow

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.