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Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe

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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.

"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.

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.

"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 assures the appearance of life by one route or another, and so discounts Conway Morris's notion that the conditions for life have to be "just right," as they are on Earth. He argues that those conditions are rare in the universe, and so account for our failure to see evidence of life elsewhere. My own view is different: My guess is that we don't find intelligent life elsewhere because when it reaches our stage of development it self-destructs. Maybe that creates a challenge: Can we be the first to acquire wisdom as well as technical skill?

Is evolutionary convergence merely a convergence of characters of two or more species when they adapt to similar ecological niches? Conway Morris would like to embed the concept in a more structured context. In reference to an interesting application he expresses it in terms of "morphological space." The particular application is to "skeleton space" as defined by Thomas and Reif. He seems to be saying that each of the conceivable morphologies in skeleton space is a fixed-point attractor. The attractor emerges as the laws of nature guide the unfolding dynamics of evolution.

Is this concept of fixed-point attractors in a character space too discrete? In "The Crucible of Creation" Conway Morris gives another example, from the work of D.M. Raup: the morphospace for the geometry of the shells secreted by the molluscs. Some regions of this morphospace are thickly populated. But other zones are more or less empty. In these, the solutions to the equations that govern the geometry can be used to visualize the hypothetical shapes, but they somehow look "wrong." Thus the general morphospace is continuous, but only particular points are realized in the real world determined by evolution.

Conway Morris makes a good case for the inevitability of humans, but the evidence is sometimes fragmentary. I think this is only the beginning. There may be as yet untapped evidence in our own present natures. In particular, I suspect that a physical understanding of the network dynamics of our nervous systems will lead to the conclusion that the brains which appeared in the Cambrian explosion would inevitably evolve to the present level, and perhaps beyond.

In Chapter 10 Conway Morris returns to the ubiquity of convergence. Convergence is found not only in directly observable phenotypic characters, but also at the molecular level. For instance, the protein rhodopsin for color vision is tuned to particular colors by substitutions at key sites, and different species adapting to the same color sometimes use identical substitutions. It can become uncertain whether molecular similarities and identities are due to convergence or common ancestry. Thus there is at the present level of knowledge a measure of uncertainty which could be exploited by creationists. But fortunately overall outlines of order are found in cladistic analysis based on molecular evidence. This reflects general human understanding as it looks out on the world with faith that order will be found.

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.

This book is in part illuminating, in part irritating, and in part offensive.

The stated purpose of the book is to show that the probability of the emergence of life is low but, once emerged, the probability of the evolution of human-like intelligence is inevitable. The unstated but unmistakable purpose of this thesis is to support the existence of a (Christian) Creator whose existence provides a purpose to evolution and to humanity. This theological motivation is woven into the fabric of the book and causes it to be a strange mixture of scientific argument and irrational, mystical, dogmatic discussion.

Chapters 6 through 10 are an illuminating discussion of convergence in evolution, supported by many interesting examples. This part of the book is (mostly) non-contentious and well worth reading although Professor Conway Morris creates the impression that this convergence may be divinely intended, maybe even guided.

The irritating part of the book is Chapters 11 and 12 in which Professor Conway Morris throws aside scientific rigor and even rational thought. Here he tries through extensive quotations and mystical musings to connect the emergence of intelligence to the existence of God. He also lists six facts of evolution that are congruent with a Creation. True but they are equally congruent with the absence of a Creation, so in what way have we advanced the discussion? There are many other irritations. For example, he takes it for granted that morality can only exist through God and never discusses how it can arise through evolution by conferring a survival advantage to a complex social species; whenever he refers to a cosmic-view without a God, he attaches pejorative adjectives, such as "corrosive", "prevailing ethos of despair", and "bleak". The corrosion, despair, and bleakness are the author's and are not inherent in the view of life that arises from scientific research.

The offensive part of the book is the first five chapters. This is the section in which Professor Conway Morris argues for the rarity (possibly the uniqueness) of life. The offensiveness is not so much in his arguments as in his style. As elsewhere in his writings, he takes cheap, gratuitous, and vicious shots at the late Stephen Jay Gould: It seems that Professor Conway Morris cannot abide even the memory of the gracious Professor Gould. Stephen Jay Gould is not the only object of the author's bile, however. For unexplained reasons, he is incensed by those researchers who claim progress in the attempt to show how life evolved from inanimate matter in the young Earth. There are many examples of unpleasant, personal intellectual arrogance towards scientists with whom he does not agree. In the end, this approach undermines the credibility of his arguments.

I find the following quote from page 105 to be revealing of the author's intent: "Earlier I remarked on the almost gleeful abasement of humans, not least to inform us that we are insignificant worms in the cosmic drama. One powerful ingredient in this dreary world picture is the Copernican triumph, of Earth the insignificant. Perhaps so, but could it be that our planet and its Solar System are both very much odder than realized. Life may be a universal principle, but we can still be alone...." Thus, it seems that, in this book, he is attempting to reverse the Copernican revolution and to restore humans to their prior position of importance in the Universe. In this he is unsuccessful.

So, is the book worth reading? No, unless you are willing to pay full price for 60% of the content (the chapters on convergence) or unless you are comforted by weak and irrational arguments, bolstered only by the scientific reputation of Professor Conway Morris.

I felt one of the great weaknesses of the book was that much of it seemed like a long list of various traits and behaviors which are convergently shared by evolutionarily distinct groups. Once someone understands the basic concept of evolutionary convergence, there is no point in citing example after example of convergence. Much of that material could have been relegated to an appendix.

If someone were to ask me whether bats and pterosaurs were convergent, I'd have to admit there are independently achieved similarities between them. At the same time, bats are bats and pterosaurs and pterosaurs. They are distinct groups. Once pterosaurs have gone extinct, that unique group is gone forever. Convergence isn't identity.

When it comes to the topic of extra-terrestrial intelligence, some alien species could be convergent on human beings without being identical to humans, just as bats and pterodactyls share leathery wings without being identical. There is no guarantee, in my opinion, that an alien race sophisticated enough to build a radio-telescope will necessarily give birth to live young, or be bipedal rather than centauroid, or possess any of a number of other traits which humans possess.

The demands of a particular ecological niche can shape the evolution of an organism, but the organism's evolution is still shaped by that organism's history and by chance. I don't think Conway Morris did a good enough job of explaining why he is so dimissive of the role of chance and evolutionary history. He briefly discusses an experiment forcing bacteria to switch from glucose to maltose as an energy source, but since I wasn't familiar with that experiment, I would have appreciately much more detail on it than what was presented in Life's Solution.

The book suffers from inconsistent expectations about the background of the readers. It is ostensibly targeted to the general reader but the long lists of examples (reminiscent of Darwin's Origin of Species) have insufficient information to understand why the convergence is unexpected and also become tedious. While weight of evidence is a reasonable approach, fewer examples with more detail about each would be more readable and the weight of similar examples could simply be referenced in an appendix for interested readers to pursue. Nevertheless, the presentation of evolutionary convergence is persuasive as an alternative to the more mainstream 'anything goes' potential evolutionary paths.

In contrast, the broader argument that the conditions that enabled life to develop on Earth are extremely unlikely and possibly unique is unconvincing. The religious overtones that some reviewers have mentioned are very brief and link to this broader argument. In any event, they are presented more as a counter to Richard Dawkin's acerbic claims than as a genuine argument for God's existence.

This has got to be one of the most interesting reads for a few years. Cambridge professor and evolutionay paleontologist Conway Morris essentially develops the almost Platonic conception of convergent evolution, suggesting that there are perfect solutions out there, and that nature has found them again and again. He illustrates this with numerous examples, living and from the fossil record. A brilliant book who's central thesis is hard to shake off and which will stay will you for a long time.

A study of the phenomena of convergence: "the recurrent tendency of biological organization to arrive at the same 'solution' to a particular 'need'".

Cambridge paleontologist Morris gives us a tour of the biological universe, pointing out how various environmental adaptations seem to follow similar patterns, hinting at some higher purpose at work in the cosmos. I don't believe that you can ever rationally prove God's existence; faith is intuitive. Yet it is reassuring to know that it is possible to integrate a respect for science and learning with that faith.

This is an exhaustive and meticulous book that makes an argument for human significance and religious meaning without abandoning evolutionary biology or legitimate science.