Brig Klyce on Morris' Life's Solution

panspermia:whatsnew


Cambridge Professor Simon Conway Morris may be the world’s foremost authority on the evolutionary phenomenon known as convergence. His book, Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe, lists over 400 examples, and describes many of them in detail. Curious about evolutionary convergences for our own reasons, we read the book with keen interest...

In Life’s Solution, Conway Morris doesn’t attempt to fully explain convergence; he only claims that studying it will lead evolutionary science out of its blind and hopeless current state. Of course, we agree that studying convergence should be quite fruitful, but we are not entirely comfortable with Conway Morris’s approach. First, in spite of his stated aversion to teleology, his language seems teleological to us. Witness the metaphor of "navigation," the chaos-theory image of "'attractors' by which evolutionary trajectories are channeled," and the terms "propensity" and "inherency". (But inherency would also apply to our evolutionary philosophy!)