Life's solution

Science and theology is one of my favorites, being a paleontologist by profession as well as a pastor. Just now I am re-reading Simon Conway Morris' book Life's solution - inevitable humans in a lonely universe.

I really must recommend that book. It is not a narrow specialist book, it is fully readable for anyone with a scientific interest. Written with humor also. Morris is challenging - with succes - the quite common view that evolution is a process steered by chance, humans happen to be one of the outcomes, but it could really have been anything. He challenges that other great paleontologist, the late Stephen J Gould, and his famous thesis that if the tape of evolution could be re-run the outcome would be quite different. It would not. Life has a tendency to move to certain specific solutions. Tendencies which apparently are rooted in the earliest organisms living long before the Scandinavian mountains I see from my kitchen window even started to form. The outcome in the end could not have become anything you can or can't imagine. It had to be humans - or something very much like humans. Evolutionary theory and theology have a bearing on each other. You get the feeling that evolution could very well be teleological (something of course the writer of Genesis 1 and 2 would happily agree with).

Simon Conway Morris is a believing evolutionist, as I am myself. He gives no room for genetic fundamentalism (with Richard Dawkins and his selfish gene as main advocates), nor for so-called creation science.
Curious?
Read the book if you haven't done that before.



A balanced book, written by a man with great knowledge and a very clear mind.