Agreed. While I have the utmost admiration for Conway Morris’s work, his opinion as to how evolution might have yielded organisms similar to us if we “played again” the “tape” that is the history of life on Earth, is one that can’be be borne out by the fossil record. Who knows what might have happened if the mammal-like reptiles were completely exterminated during the termial Permian and Triassic mass extinctions?

In fairness, there have also been talks that have done less for me. Although he was rather entertaining, and pleasingly idiosyncratic, I had a pretty tough time with the arguments of Simon Conway Morris, who moves from the (to me) fairly unremarkable observation of evolutionary convergences to the argument that if you were to run it all again, evolution would produce pretty similar types of organisms. I am not an evolutionary scientist, but I have read a lot about evolution, and I find this idea difficult to swallow.

The difficulty with this position is that it neglects the impact of mass extinctions caused by natural events. In particular, if the K/T extinction due to the asteroid/comet impact had not occurred, life would probably look quite different then it does now. In particular, we probably wouldn’t be here!

I do seem to remember having heard of some science fiction author or futurist, of some stature, stating that it was likely that the first person who would live to be 1000 years old had probably already been born. And that was about 10 years ago.

…if you were to run it all again, evolution would produce pretty similar types of organisms…

I suspect this is truer of basic types rather than specific organisms. There seems to be, at certain transitional moments in evolutionary history, a favouring of the omnivorous, long, low, lean, quadrupedal body type.

On the other hadn, if you wind evolution back all the way, who is to say that we’d end up with predominantly bilaterally symmetrical animals, photosynthetic plants, etc., etc. The resulting life forms might fill the same ecological niches, and might therefore end up looking the same, but the internal biology could be radically different.

Too bad you weren’t at the World Science Festival here in New York City, which concluded yesterday. Your post makes the most compelling case I have read so far as to why the Templeton Foundation has a right to disseminate financial contributions in support of scientific research and education; it is a case far more compelling than any I heard at the World Science Festival.

Sincerely,

John