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Title: Life's Solution : Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe by Simon Conway Morris ISBN: 0-521-82704-3 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 04 September, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (11 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Delightful and thought provoking
Comment: 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.
Rating: 2
Summary: Conway Morris fails to present a coherent case
Comment: Conway Morris attempts to demonstrate to the reader that life on earth is unique, and wherever life gets going, intelligent, humanoid life is certain to follow. On both points, Conway Morris fails to present a coherent case. The text is littered with claims which don't support his conclusion, hypothetical events that go nowhere, and some of the most graceless prose I've ever seen outside an academic journal. I can forgive bad prose if the information contained is worth it, but in this case Conway Morris fails to deliver.
As self-contained stories of convergence in evolution, the book works well, and this is why I give it two stars. However, when he tries to tie his anecdotes into the larger theme, the thin reeds break under the strain. As an example, Conway Morris identifies a feature in evolutionary history he calls "inherency." He doesn't define it, but illustrates it by an example of the brain of a lancelet, which apparently lacks the division of fore-, mid- and hindbrain characteristic of vertebrates. However, according to Conway Morris, "the molecular evidence, which is also backed up by some exquisitely fine studies of microanatomy, suggests that, cryptically, the brain of amphioxus has regions equivalent to the tripartite division seen in the vertebrates." From this, Conway Morris reasons "in some sense amphioxus carries the inherent potential for intelligence." Does this support Conway Morris' thesis? No. The fact that early chordates possessed a three-part division in their brains doesn't imply intelligence, it is a structure which later evolutionary adaptations accommodated.
Conway Morris then introduces the idea that life is immensely improbable. Unfortunately, he does it by attacking the comprehensiveness of contemporary research. Yes, DNA is immensely intricate, and yes, the transition from RNA to DNA is poorly understood, but to make a case for the improbability of the emergence of life, he would have to address the mechanisms of generating self-replicating structures in light of the chemistry of the early earth. Conway Morris never attempts a detailed critique, with an emphasis on the probable chemistry of the origin of life, but is content to regale us with conventional platitudes. The argument's lack of substance becomes apparent when one compares Conway Morris' position with the published opinions of researchers in the origins of life.
He also throws in a few bromides related to the anthropic principle, including the apparent size of the moon being just right for full solar eclipses. Since it has nothing to do with the main themes in the book, it is one of those examples of an illustration that goes nowhere.
Now we get to the substance of the book, a paean to convergence in evolution. However, convergence, in general, fails to support the argument. Since Conway Morris is arguing that humanoids are a likely end result of evolution, he needs to provide some evidence that the convergence between humans and other organisms implies that, on another planet, all the traits of humans will be realized in one organism.
Biogeography past and present mitigates against Conway Morris' claims too. For example, there are fishing birds and predatory mammals in both Antarctica and the Arctic. So far, so good for Conway Morris' thesis. However, the fishing bird in the Arctic is the auk, and in Antarctica the penguin. The differences are even more pronounced comparing the two predatory mammals--in the Arctic it's the polar bear, and in Antarctica it's the leopard seal. In both cases, the organisms survive in the same ways, under the same conditions, but they are different because of their evolutionary history. This is not to say that Gould's thesis is correct in every particular. Gould was too enthralled with the idea of evolution as a random walk. Natural selection certainly does constrain evolution, but these constraints merely produce organisms which are similar in broad strokes.
One of Conway Morris' illustrations is especially puzzling. Conway Morris points out that both eutherian cats and metatherians have evolved saber-toothed species. To me, this is not surprising news: you take predators, and they'll have sharp, tearing teeth. Give them much larger herbivorous animals to prey on, and they'll evolve teeth which are equal to the challenge. There the similarities end: the saber-toothed marsupials had oversized incisors and the saber-toothed cat's saber teeth were canines. A pair of big sharp pointy teeth (forgive the Python reference :-D) seems to be the only commonality, and that characteristic only emerges because the theria, as a group, had differentiated teeth. When you take a Cretaceous era predator which also fed on prey much larger than itself, you see something like Velociraptor, which had a enlarged claw, rather than saber teeth, because the teeth of Velociraptor were not very differentiated. Here again, different evolutionary trajectories produce different solutions to the same problem. Curiously, Conway Morris identifies *Allosaurus* as the Mesozoic parallel for the saber-toothed cats, despite the absence of saber teeth in Allosaurus. If the key characteristic that Conway Morris uses to identify convergence is missing in Allosaurus, how can we understand his use of the term convergence? It would seem that Conway Morris, like Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty, wants convergence to mean whatever he wishes it to mean.
Conway Morris, in this book, attempts to start a dialogue between religion and science by utilizing bad scientific arguments. However, a more famous professing Christian had this to say about such arguments:
"Often a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other parts of the world, about the motions and orbits of the stars and even their sizes and distances,... and this knowledge he holds with certainty from reason and experience. It is thus offensive and disgraceful for an unbeliever to hear a Christian talk nonsense about such things, claiming that what he is saying is based in Scripture. We should do all that we can to avoid such an embarrassing situation, lest the unbeliever see only ignorance in the Christian and laugh to scorn." -- St. Augustine
Would that Conway Morris had considered this before writing.
Rating: 3
Summary: The inevitability of creation
Comment: This book is yeat another example of evolutionists' leaps of faith. Instead of comming to the obvious conclusion that the convergence of biological principles and mechanisms is the result of the inteligent design of a Common Creator, the author concludes by the inevitability of evolution. This is not fact. This is the author's convenient interpretation. Frankly I don't see any evidence that supports that conclusion. All the evidence supports instantaneous creation ex nihilo.The convergence of millions of nucleotides to precisely build and sequence aminoacids, proteins, molecular machines and cells and to assemble all that in highly complex and diverse biological organisms and systems cannot be axplained both by gradualism or by saltationism. It can only reasonably be the result of creation ex nihilo by a Super Intellect, God "the author of Life".
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Title: Life on a Young Planet : The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth by Andrew H. Knoll ISBN: 0691009783 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 17 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Darwin and Design : Does Evolution Have a Purpose? by Michael Ruse ISBN: 067401023X Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: May, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Unintelligent Design by Mark Perakh ISBN: 1591020840 Publisher: Prometheus Books Pub. Date: December, 2003 List Price(USD): $32.00 |
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Title: The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals by Simon Conway Morris, Simon Conway-Morris ISBN: 0192862022 Publisher: Getty Ctr for Education in the Arts Pub. Date: December, 1999 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: A Devil's Chaplain : Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love by Richard Dawkins ISBN: 0618335404 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 29 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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