From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution

Review\n“Despite some misgivings, I found From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds to be a good-humoured and thought-provoking book that both challenged notions I hold dear and provided genuinely interesting ideas. The breadth of research that was put into it is hard to miss, with 167 out of 409 pages providing hundreds of notes per chapter, most referencing multiple papers and responses. I have time for Conway Morris on account of his excellent past work and achievements while always keeping in mind he is a bit of a provocateur.” —The Inquisitive Biologist "An elegant and informative account of many popular mistakes about our evolutionary history, with fascinating details about creatures from surprisingly complex protists, through trilobites and almost-birds, all the way to our own peculiar species. Simon Conway Morris marshals his arguments and information to good effect, with an engaging openness to really peculiar theories and possible counterexamples." —Stephen R. L. Clark, DPhil, emeritus professor of philosophy, University of Liverpool\n“If, somehow, the Christian visionary poet-artist William Blake were a world-class Cambridge paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and astrobiologist, drank gin and tonics, and was very, very funny, you would have a human marvel approaching Simon Conway Morris. You would also have a world at once physical and mythical—a true cosmic story come alive, become real, that we are writing even as we are being written by it. You would have a ‘universe built on imagination,’ which is to say, ‘on consciousness.’ You would have what appears to be so.” —Jeffrey J. Kripal, PhD, J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religion and associate dean of the School of Humanities, Rice University\n“A classic Simon Conway Morris book. The point is not whether you agree with him (I rarely do) but whether you are intrigued, challenged, having fun with the play of ideas—as I always am. Equally, as always, I am deeply impressed by the profound understanding of evolutionary processes, as the author takes us on a dazzling tour through such topics as randomness and extinctions, to supposed missing links (Conway Morris the paleontologist is very good here) and then on to animal minds and extraterrestrials. A worthy successor to Life’s Solution. Highly recommended.” —Michael Ruse, PhD, professor emeritus at the University of Guelph, Canada, and author of The Gaia Hypothesis\n“This book opens a fresh perspective on the evolutionary process, a very welcome change from the neo-Darwinian orthodoxy that has predominated for so long. Conway Morris shows convincingly that long term trends stretch over many millions of years, developmental patterns occur again and again in many kinds of convergent evolution, and all this take place in a universe built on imagination. Altogether surprising and liberating.” —Rupert Sheldrake, PhD, author of The Science Delusion\nIn this learned romp of science writing, Cambridge professor Simon Conway Morris cheerfully challenges six assumptions—what he calls ‘myths’—that too often pass as unquestioned truths amongst the evolutionary orthodox.\nHis convivial tour begins with the idea that evolution is boundless in the kinds of biological systems it can produce. Not true, he says. The process is highly circumscribed and delimited. Nor is it random. This popular notion holds that evolution proceeds blindly, with no endgame. But Conway Morris suggests otherwise, pointing to evidence that the processes of evolution are “seeded with inevitabilities.”\nIf that is so, then what about mass extinctions? Don’t they steer the development of life in radically new directions? Rather the reverse, claims Conway Morris. Such cataclysms simply accelerate evolutionary developments that were going to happen anyway. And what about that other evolutionary canard: the “missing link”? Plenty to choose from in the fossil record but what is persistently over-looked is that in any group there is not one but