Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe 1st Edition

Many years ago I took an advanced course on phycology where we discussed evolutionary convergence, particularly with regard to the volvocine line of evolution observed in both Chlorophyta and Chrysophyta. I tucked this information away as being interesting but not pertaining to anything particularly important. "Life's Solution" brought this all back to me and made me realize how important convergence may be to understanding the evolution of life on this planet. With apologies to the late Stephen Jay Gould, perhaps if the tape were run again, the results would be the same, or at least close. Perhaps intelligent beings such as us, or something very much like us, were inevitable. The philosophical implications are profound. Conway Morris avoids these philosophical and theological implications until the last chapter of his book and concentrates on providing example after example of convergence in evolution. Although not as eloquent a writer as Richard Dawkins, he successfully challenges Dawkins' "ultra-Darwinist" views. And as one of the leading paleontologists in the world today, Conway Morris has the scientific credentials to do this.

Because of his scientific and philosophical views, Conway Morris has been branded by some to be a proponent of "Intelligent Design." However, he clearly cannot be categorized with this group for purely scientific reasons. Intelligent design denies that evolution can explain complex biological structures or relationships among living things. Conway Morris goes to great lengths to show that evolution does indeed provide an explanation for these structures and relationships. Intelligent design, for instance, denies that the cameric eye could have evolved because of its extraordinary complexity. It must have been designed and created by an intelligent being. Conway Morris shows in his book that it not only did the eye evolve, but the basic "design" evolved six separate times involving different tissues in each instance. In fact, the cephalopod eye variation is more efficient than the vertebrate variation of the "design." Make no mistake about it Conway Morris is a "Darwinian evolutionist."

In his last chapter, Conway Morris plays his philosophical-theological hand and discusses the implications of his views in terms of teleology and directionality to evolution. In doing so, he shows himself to be a successor to the great early 20th century paleontologist and philosopher/theologian Teilhard de Chardin. Conway Morris' views of Christianity are well known and perhaps this is why he has drawn the ire of so many ultra-Darwinist "theologians" such as Dawkins.

Randomness is a basic tenant of evolution. However, that does not mean that certain structures are not inevitable for purely physical and biological reasons. If you roll the dice enough times you inevitably will roll snake eyes or box cars. And in a philosophical and theological sense, it does not mean that God does not play with loaded dice.

Professor Morris's book, Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe, is a superb book. For one thing it's distinctly different from the general run of books on the topics of paleontology and evolution, since it focuses on convergence among living things rather than on the distinctions among them which create the phylogenetic arrangement of life that we learn about in high school biology.

It has become much the fashion to examine life as it arouse on our own planet so as to predict the character of any life we might encounter on other inhabited worlds. Everyone from science fiction authors to biologists have gotten into the business, and the overall opinion seems to be that intelligent life is out there, probably in large numbers, and will be dramatically different from what exists here. Some of the only dissenters have been Peter Ward and David Brownlee in their book, Rare Earth, which gave many cogent reasons why even if life is prolific "out there," it might not be at as complex a level as to produce sentience. Even Professor Ward has since recanted and joined the research teams across the US who are trying to understand how alien life might develop to a level of intelligence matching that of the human on earth. In his case, I suspect, his thesis in Rare Earth, while interesting enough to sell the book, was a professional dead end while researching the origin of life and the possible characteristics of extraterrestrials is very much in vogue now.

Aside from suggesting life is common in the universe, almost everyone agrees that it will be found to be distinctly different. Much of this concept, as Morris himself points out, can be laid at Stephen Jay Gould's door and his notion that if one re-rolled evolution on earth and replayed it, the outcome would be dramatically different, because different contingencies would arise and send life on a different trajectory. That pathway would be statistically unlikely to lead to humans again or to anything like them. From Gould's point of view, humans and intelligence are not "written into" evolution. Life has not been scaling heights to reach the pinnacle in the human being, in short, for Gould humans are not inevitable. This position was taken in large part as a response to the notion of "progress" in evolution and to religious determinism, "god intended humans."

Others, including Ward and Brownlee, have pointed out that big brains--and intelligence seems to be confined to brains that are big for the expected size based on body mass--are expensive, both in terms of the fraction of an animal's nutritional supply and of its O2 carrying capacity (about 20-25% in humans) needed to sustain them. The physiological requirements necessary for a brain that understands Gödel's theorems--let alone that needed to be Gödel coming up with them--is considerable. With this understanding, unless it provides the animal with a distinct advantage, in the opinion of many researchers in the field such brains are not likely to evolve, certainly not more than once. From this perspective, intelligence is a fluke, something that occurred purely by accident.

Given the modern orientation to evolution and to extraterrestrial life, Morris's book seems very counter current. He focuses, not on the contingencies of evolutionary events that create species and are nonrepeatable--although he admits their reality--but on the convergences that suggest that evolution functions as it does within chemical and physical constraints that produce profound, underlying similarities among living things, some of them as distinct as plants from animals or single from multiple celled life forms. Furthermore, he does so with remarkable success. The book is a compendium of intriguing biological facts.

The author begins his argument by putting evolution and the origin of life into perspective. Beginning at the atomic and molecular level, Morris points out that life and evolution probably had--and still have--only a few "choices" in overcoming certain central problems of existence. These limited choices provided more of a structural framework for evolutionary change on this planet than is commonly understood. In short, these limited choices provide a trajectory that may very well lead, not specifically to humans as such, but quite possibly to something very much like us, even in some of the details. Furthermore, he believes that it might do much the same on other planets similar to our own. To quote the author himself:

"I argued above that any alien astronomers would use a camera-eye, and when they asked for a drink we can be pretty sure the mechanism of hearing will be strangely familiar. So, too, as they sniff the gin and tonic they will register the same olfactory signal of juniper berries, while convergence of taste should lead them to close momentarily those camera-eyes. And as already indicated, there will be yet deeper similarities, not only in transduction mechanisms using recurrent protein designs, but also the way in which meaning is conveyed and recognized. Human speech, and thus hearing, is well known for what is referred to as `categorical perception.' That is, despite a continuum of sound, we divide the signal into discrete categories. So, too with other vertebrates, such as birds (pp. 193-194)."

The author's discussion of convergence among life forms on earth provide a striking example of evolution's ability to produce similar solutions to similar problems among various animals. His description of brains and intelligence among other animals, especially those of elephants and the toothed whales is truly interesting, and makes me wonder what the heck we think we're doing when we push these creatures so close to edge of extinction. If we find it unnerving to be the only intelligent life in the universe, why are we so unwilling to give a little space to other intelligent forms of life on this planet?

The author, however, is not as sanguineous with respect to the ubiquity of life in the universe. He, like Ward and Brownlee, sees the particularities of our planet as the truly unique contingency on life and its characteristics. Like these authors, he is inclined to view life as possibly wide spread but not necessarily at the level of complexity that many looking for ET would like to believe are out there. For him, as the title of the book suggests, humans or human-like organisms may be "inevitable," the outcome of the constraints of evolutionary processes, but we may still be alone in the universe.

An amazing book.

It is good to read a book by an expert who demonstrates what I always believe - namely: we are meant to be here. The key concept of course is evolutionary convergence. Different species of no clear relationship can develop similar "solutions" to life's problems. E.g. agriculture: both human beings and ants do farming, and obviously they are very different from each other. Another cliched example: the eye. Throughout the vast history of life, the eye appeared many times in various lines of organisms, reasonably unrelated. Likewise, very different organisms manage to form similar if not same compounds merely via the process of natural selection.

In essence, there seems a set of underlying constraints that will lead to the inevitable development of certain biological characteristics, and these most likely include intelligence, consciousness and sentience.

What a marvelous insight! I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book and I completely agree with the author's arguments.