Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe [Paperback]

Simon Conway Morris (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 8, 2004 | ISBN-10: 0521603250 | ISBN-13: 978-0521603256

Life's Solution builds a persuasive case for the predictability of evolutionary outcomes. The case rests on a remarkable compilation of examples of convergent evolution, in which two or more lineages have independently evolved similar structures and functions. The examples range from the aerodynamics of hovering moths and hummingbirds to the use of silk by spiders and some insects to capture prey. Going against the grain of Darwinian orthodoxy, this book is a must read for anyone grappling with the meaning of evolution and our place in the Universe. Simon Conway Morris is the Ad Hominen Professor in the Earth Science Department at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St. John's College and the Royal Society. His research focuses on the study of constraints on evolution, and the historical processes that lead to the emergence of complexity, especially with respect to the construction of the major animal body parts in the Cambrian explosion. Previous books include The Crucible of Creation (Getty Center for Education in the Arts, 1999) and co-author of Solnhofen (Cambridge, 1990). Hb ISBN (2003) 0-521-82704-3

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In a crisp, passionate argument sure to draw the wrath of many biologists, Simon Conway Morris defends his belief that evolutionary science is misguided without a somewhat religious notion of the significance of human intelligence and existence. At the same time, he is careful to distance himself from creation "scientists" by reminding readers that:

Evolution is true, it happens, it is the way the world is, and we too are one of its products. This does not mean that evolution does not have metaphysical implications; I remain convinced that this is the case.

He uses convergence as his foundation, defining it as "the recurrent tendency of biological organization to arrive at the same 'solution' to a particular 'need'" and offering a multitude of examples, including eusociality, olfaction, and the generation of electrical fields. In outlining the direction and inevitability he believes is inherent in evolution, Conway Morris stacks up compelling evidence in the form of a revealed "protein hyperspace" that limits the possibilities of amino acid combination to a few, often repeated (pre-ordained?) forms. While he skirts a focus on the relentless environmental pressures that result in adaptation, Conway Morris also derides the notion that the gene rules evolution. He accuses his opponents (primarily Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins) "genetic fundamentalism" who use "sleights of hand, special pleading, and sanctimoniousness... trying to smuggle back the moral principle through the agency of the gene." Dense with examples and complex biological proofs, Life's Solution is not an easy explanation of convergence for general readers. Still, it is a clear and exciting elucidation of the theory that evolution might have predictable outcomes, even for those who find Conway Morris' metaphysical arguments unconvincing. --Therese Littleton --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"Life's Solution is an absorbing presentation written to challenge and inform the mind of the reader. Life's Solution is a superb contribution to both Contemporary Philosophy Studies academic reference collections and University level and Evolutionary Biology reading lists." Is Library Bookwatch, December 2003

"Simon Conway Morris's bold new book, Life's Solution, challenges this Darwinian orthodoxy by extending ideas he presented in his Crucible of Creation. Conway Morris presents scores of fascinating examples that are less familiar. The lesson is clear. The living world is peppered with recurrent themes; it is not an accumulation of unique events." -- New York Times Book Review

"Simon Conway Morris's bold new book, Life's Solution, challenges [the] Darwinian orthodoxy by extending ideas he presented in his 'Crucible of Creation'...Conway Morris presents scores of fascinating examples that are less familiar. The lesson is clear. The living world is peppered wtih recurrent themes; it is not an accumulation of unique events." New York Times Book Review

"Are human beings the insignificant products of countless quirky biological accidents, or the expected result of evolutionary patterns deeply embedded in the structure of natural selection? Drawing upon diverse biological evidence, Conway Morris convincingly argues that the general features of our bodies and minds are indeed written into the laws of the universe. This is a truly inspiring book, and a welcome antidote to the bleak nihilism of the ultra-Darwinists." Paul Davies, Author of Mind of God

Praise for previous book... "Having spent four centuries taking the world to bits and trying to find out what makes it tick, in the 21st century scientists are now trying to fit the pieces together and understand why the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Simon Conway Morris provides the best overview, from a biolgical viewpoint, of how complexity on the large scale arises from simple laws on the small scale, and why creatures like us may not be the accidents that many suppose. This is the most important book about evolution since The Selfish Gene; essential reading for everyone who has wondered about why we are here in a Universe that seems tailor-made for life. John Gribbin, Author of Science: A History

"Morris gives a detailed and fascinating account of numerous examples of evolutionary convergence, ranging in scale and complexity from molecular functions to physiology, morphology, sensory organs, behavior, complex social systems, and, finally, intelligence. Highly recommended for both academic and larger public libraries." Library Journal

"If you have not done so ... read Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe." Toronto, Ontario Globe & Mail

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Product Details

• Paperback: 486 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (November 8, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521603250
• ISBN-13: 978-0521603256
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.3 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #608,049 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 37 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Delightful and thought provoking February 24, 2004

By Jay W. Richards

Format:Hardcover

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.

24 of 28 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An Excellent Book January 15, 2004

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

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.

112 of 142 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Lively, mind-expanding, infuriating and incisive October 6, 2003

By Edwin Kite

Format:Hardcover

"Life's solution" celebrates convergent evolution, which Conway Morris uses to account both for the apparent progress of life from amoeba to whale, and its end in Homo Sapiens. He extends this notion to the emergence of human society, and the prospects of life "altogether elsewhere".

The issue of whether life history has an arrow of destiny at all (rather than random bumbling that may occasionally hit an anthropomorphic jackpot) is still up in the air. Natural selection certainly produces environmental adaptation over the fine grain of centuries and millenia. And over millions of years, an increase in complexity has been observed in such esoteric organs as arthropod appendages and crinoid feeding nets. But at the grandest scale, we have little to go on other than Victorian ideas that reptiles were bested by mammals in a great Darwinian struggle, which is nonsense. Bad luck - a bad asteroid - wiped out the dinosaurs, leaving empty space that mammals could fill. 180 million years earlier, it was the ancestors of mammals that drew the short straw.

But Conway Morris, unusually, isn't interested in whose sperm survives the apocalypse. Since environments cleave form to function, the same general biological properties arise everywhere. So New Caledonia, lacking mammalian predators, evolved giant flightless birds, the tigrish Sylviornus, with hooked beaks. (They were wiped out by the ancestral Polynesians, with good reason). Aping Darwin's writing, "Life's solution" is a book of examples, an accumulation of examples of convergence in action. This structure lends the book a bitty texture; it says the same thing over and over again, so reading five pages at a sitting will not lose the thread. This makes it an ideal book for busy readers.

The book is threaded with the notion of "biological hyperspace," a conceptual landscape in which each point corresponds to a design for life. Hills in the landscape are poorly adapted to the environment, and, over time, natural selection nudges life into the better-adapted valleys. Although life takes very varied routes through this landscape, functional constraints limit the number of destinations - each corresponding to an ecological syndrome such as hive society, the compound eye or intelligence. Michael Denton and Craig Marshall claim that "underlying all the diversity of life is a finite set of natural forms that will recur over and over again anywhere in the cosmos where there is carbon-based life." This refers to proteins, not pianists, but makes a key point: progress-through-convergence is equivalent to destiny. And teleology, with its register of "inferior" and "better" forms, is a dangerous brew. Conway Morris wonders how much of convergence may be the working-out of the particular inherent potential of the animal genetic architecture. At what point, he wonders, did intelligence, become inevitable? His answer: close to the origin of life.

Convergence is powerful, and Conway Morris is right to emphasise it's importance in driving evolution over millions of years. But his attempt to extend it to the billions of years of Earth's story is tenuous. There are several problems. The main events in the early evolution of life - sex, oxygen, and the chlorophyll/Rubisco stitch-up - were probably accidents. Niche specialisation erodes the genetic plasticity that convergence needs. And once life underwent the Cambrian Explosion - somehow turning from slime into animals - it became especially vulnerable to rare shocks and their afteraffects.

Here's a catastrophic example. I am united with gerbils and the platypus by having a kind of window in my skull, just behind the eyes. This makes me a synapsid. The dinosaurs (with two holes in their heads) were diapsids, and hole-less turtles are anapsids. For argument's sake, let's reroute the asteroid that hit Earth 251 million years ago, hitting Pangaea instead of Panthallasa. Destruction on the supercontinent is total; the synapsids and diapsids are wiped out; only a few well-armoured, ageless anapsids survive to reconquer the planet. But once the anapsid syndrome - toothless, stiff-necked, boneheaded, and boxed inside tough shells - became dominant, it is difficult to see how the delicate, social sentients seen as inevitable by Conway Morris could have evolved. Until the next disaster, Earth would have been in mutant turtle lockdown.

Conway Morris' chapters on the origin of life are unfortunate. He talks about chemistries, while most workers talk about energies and information. "Life's solution" glibly dismisses the theory of self-organisation and criticality, the rock and foundation of the claim that life is a cosmic principle.

This book continues an argument with the late, brilliant Harvard evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould, whose overweight prose was matched only by his girth. He called progress "a noxious, culturally embedded, untestable, nonoperational, intractable idea that must be replaced." Conway Morris countered that progress remained a cornerstone of evolutionary understanding. This was not just an argument about science, because each man saw the other's theory as the surface expression of an iceberg of repugnant dogma. In 1999, Gould wrote that he "would value... explicit attention to the sources of [Conway Morris'] own unexamined beliefs" - i.e., Christianity.

Conway Morris' reply is an attempt to construct a theology of evolution. Monotheism (founded on holy mystery) is to science (founded on reason) as oil to water: coexistence is possible but mixing requires plenty of energy. The last Cambridge scholar to try, the young Ludwig Wittgenstein, lost his footing badly. "Life's Solution" is more cautious. Joining the ellipses, hints, and things implied but left unsaid, Conway Morris appears to believe that life was created by divine sparkplug and that convergence was designed-in to jolly life along the golden path from bog to Bhopal. Make of this what you will, but my instincts are that this "God? The Naked Mole Rats Say Yes!" stuff, popularised by Connie Barrow, is a form of intellectual cowardice. It's as unenlightening and unenlightened as the long-dead view that an irreducible "vital force" accounted for biological energy. (In one sense it does; it's called citric acid). Natural order need be neither implicate nor inscribed, yet retains its wonder and majesty.