Lifes Solution

The assassin’s bullet misses, the Archduke’s carriage moves forward, and a catastrophic war is avoided. So too with the history of life. Re-run the tape of life, as Stephen J. Gould claimed, and the outcome must be entirely different: an alien world, without humans and maybe not even intelligence. The history of life is littered with accidents: any twist or turn may lead to a completely different world. Now this view is being challenged. Simon Conway Morris explores the evidence demonstrating life’s almost eerie ability to navigate to a single solution, repeatedly. Eyes, brains, tools, even culture: all are very much on the cards. So if these are all evolutionary inevitabilities, where are our counterparts across the galaxy? The tape of life can only run on a suitable planet, and it seems that such Earth-like planets may be much rarer than hoped. Inevitable humans, yes, but in a lonely Universe.

Spis treści:
The Cambridge Sandwich
1. Looking for Easter Island
2. Can we break the great code?
3. Universal Goo, life as a cosmic principle?
4. The origin of life, straining the soup or our credulity?
5. Uniquely lucky? The strangeness of Earth
6. Converging on the extreme
7. Seeing convergence
8. Alien convergences?
9. The non-prevalence of humanoids?
10. Evolution bound, the ubiquity of convergence
11. Towards a theology of evolution
12. Last word.