Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe

Professor Morris's book, Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe, is a superb book. For one thing it's distinctly different from the general run of books on the topics of paleontology and evolution, since it focuses on convergence among living things rather than on the distinctions among them which create the phylogenetic arrangement of life that we learn about in high school biology. It has become much the fashion to examine life as it arouse on our own planet so as to predict the character of any life we might encounter on other inhabited worlds. Everyone from science fiction authors to biologists have gotten into the business, and the overall opinion seems to be that intelligent life is out there, probably in large numbers, and will be dramatically different from what exists here. Some of the only dissenters have been Peter Ward and David Brownlee in their book, Rare Earth, which gave many cogent reasons why even if life is prolific "out there," it might not be at as complex a level as to produce sentience. Even Professor Ward has since recanted and joined the research teams across the US who are trying to understand how alien life might develop to a level of intelligence matching that of the human on earth. In his case, I suspect, his thesis in Rare Earth, while interesting enough to sell the book, was a professional dead end while researching the origin of life and the possible characteristics of extraterrestrials is very much in vogue now. Aside from suggesting life is common in the universe, almost everyone agrees that it will be found to be distinctly different. Much of this concept, as Morris himself points out, can be laid at Stephen Jay Gould's door and his notion that if one re-rolled evolution on earth and replayed it, the outcome would be dramatically different, because different contingencies would arise and send life on a different trajectory. That pathway would be statistically unlikely to lead to humans again or to anything like them. From Gould's point of view, humans and intelligence are not "written into" evolution. Life has not been scaling heights to reach the pinnacle in the human being, in short, for Gould humans are not inevitable. This position was taken in large part as a response to the notion of "progress" in evolution and to religious determinism, "god intended humans." Others, including Ward and Brownlee, have pointed out that big brains--and intelligence seems to be confined to brains that are big for the expected size based on body mass--are expensive, both in terms of the fraction of an animal's nutritional supply and of its O2 carrying capacity (about 20-25% in humans) needed to sustain them. The physiological requirements necessary for a brain that understands Gödel's theorems--let alone that needed to be Gödel coming up with them--is considerable. With this understanding, unless it provides the animal with a distinct advantage, in the opinion of many researchers in the field s

"Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe," by Simon Conway Morris, received a critical review from a mainstream evolutionary biologist in SCIENCE, 5 December 2003. It was stated that many biologists may be convinced that Conway Morris is giving aid and comfort to the enemy (the creationists). The reviewer saw that Conway Morris opposes creationism, but was still critical. I can see that the book might be irritating to materialists (scientific or otherwise), but if its sometimes-controversial tone is overlooked, it has much to offer the general reader. When Conway Morris takes a position that is not orthodox, it is usually qualified with a question mark. I think the major positive contribution of the book is its many fascinating examples of convergence.There is a remarkable relationship between the views of Stephen Jay Gould in "Wonderful Life," published in 1989, and those of Conway Morris in "Life's Solution," published in 2003. Conway Morris opposes Gould's idea of contingency. But the strange thing is that Gould, while claiming support for contingency from the Cambrian fauna, praised the work of Conway Morris on that fauna. From the time of the Cambrian explosion of animal forms to the present there has been a marked reduction in the number of general forms. Gould would take this as evidence of the fragility of forms in the face of chance contingencies. But Conway Morris sees it as a consequence of convergence. The two men seemingly differ only in their conclusions from the evidence, but I think there is a deeper divide. To Gould nature is fundamentally probabilistic, but to Conway Morris it is deterministic. I agree, recalling that Einstein championed determinism in physics.Gould used the idea of replaying the tape of evolution. He argued that contingencies would make the reappearance of man very unlikely. To Gould, a replay is only a thought experiment to help us understand. But Conway Morris asks what can be done in the laboratory? On pages 121-124 he describes experiments done by Lenski and Travisano with the bacterium Escherichia coli over a large number of generations. It was first separated into several populations. Then they were allowed to diversify, and were separated further. Finally all populations were switched from their customary and agreeable glucose diet to a maltose diet and allowed to try to adapt during 1000 generations. The degree and mode of their adaptation was partly due to convergence, in addition to starting points and chance, and the three could be separated statistically. Over the long term, convergence won.Conway Morris questions the theory of the "RNA world," including the idea that the RNA was self-replicating. I think he overdoes his skepticism there. A Perspective by Leslie Orgel: "A simpler nucleic acid," in SCIENCE, 17 Nov 2000, discusses self-replication of the simpler nucleic acid TNA as well as RNA. It seems to me that the self-replicating property of RNA, TNA and similar nucleic acids assu

Life's Solution is one of those books that does not easily submit to a pithy review. The book is many things. It is first of all a striking and elegantly written catalogue of what Conway Morris calls "the ubiquity of convergence" in the biological world. While many folks are familiar with a handful of examples of convergence (the camera eye and those marsupials in Australia come to mind), it is remarkable how pervasive the phenomenon is. In fact, although I still don't know what to make of it, Conway Morris convinced me that convergence is a fact about the world that deserves more attention than it has received.But the book is much more than a mere compendium of examples. For Conway Morris uses the ubiquity of convergence as a counterweight to the almost orthodox view that the history of life is a governed by a large helping of luck and accident, and that, to paraphrase S.J. Gould, if we reran the tape of life's history, it would have turned out entirely differently. Convergence suggests that, whatever the role played by happenstance, natural selection has worked under narrow constraints built into the structure of reality.Conway Morris concludes the book with some perhaps preliminary discussions about the possibility of religious and scientific understandings of the world peacefully co-existing. Here as elswhere, Conway Morris only hints at certain ideas rather than pursuing them exhaustively. As a result, some reviewers have written unfair and uncharitable things about the book. But I, for one, was left with much to ponder, and with the hope that Conway Morris will continue his provocative explorations.

Cambridge paleontologist Simon Conway Morris in this book covers convergence and its implications for understanding evolution. Convergence (also called homoplasy) is the independent evolution of similar traits among distantly related organisms such as humans and octopi have similar eye anatomy (although one is inverted, the other verted). Life is replete with examples of convergence on every level: molecular, cellular, even behavioral. Convergence is the key to understanding that evolution, despite its tremendous variety, is fraught with direction, or shall we dare say, purpose. It is a bold statement that will undoubtedly receive a strong reaction from the bulk of the evolutionary community. Morris uses almost half of the book to discuss the building blocks of life (DNA, RNA, proteins, and sugars such as ribose) .He shows that, although these building blocks are very easy to synthesize, this does not help us to understand the origin of life, which, he argues persuasively, is about as unlikely an event as can be conceived. Every approach we have taken to understand how life could have originated now seems at a dead end. Morris spends one chapter looking at the uniqueness of our planet and concludes, as does Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee, that life of any kind is a phenomenally unlikely state of affairs anywhere in the universe. While upholding an adaptationist view, Morris labels adherents of the cold, ruthless, and ultimately purposeless evolutionary reality, such as Huxley, Simpson, Mayr, Ernst Haeckel, Clarence Darrow, and even Richard Dawkins as "ultra-Darwinists". He finds fault with the religious fervor of their pronouncements, and their utter ignorance of theology. Convergence, argues Morris, tells us that a Higher Purpose controls Nature. Morris is also as critical of those who harbor doubts about evolution as he is of those who seek to glorify it, but the criticism of ID and creationism is brief compared to the time spent against "ultra-Darwinists". Morris, no doubt, realizes that he left himself open to the charge of being a creationist, and so makes a few remarks castigating them.