lifes solution inevitable humans in a lonely universe

Life’s Solution
Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe
The assassin’s bullet misses, the Archduke’s carriage moves forward,
and a catastrophic war is avoided. So too with the history of life. Rerun
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 the correct 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 run only on a suitable planet, and
it seems that such Earth-like planets may be much rarer than is hoped.
Inevitable humans, yes, but in a lonely Universe.
simon conway morris is Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology at
the University of Cambridge. He was elected a fellow of the Royal
Society in 1990, and presented the Royal Institution Christmas lectures
in 1996. His work on Cambrian soft-bodied faunas has taken him to
China, Mongolia, Greenland, and Australia, and inspired his previous
book The Crucible of Creation (1998).
Pre-publication praise for Life’s Solution:
‘Having spent four centuries taking the world to bits and trying to find
out what makes it tick, in the twenty-first 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 biological 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
‘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 How to Build a Time Machine
‘Is intelligent life in the Universe common or incredibly rare? Are even
planets like the Earth rare? We won’t really know until our searches are
further advanced, but until then these debates pivot on the tension
between contingency and convergence. Advocates of the first point to
the unlikelihood of particular historical paths, while those favoring the
second emphasize multiple paths to similar functional outcomes. In
Life’s Solution Conway Morris argues that the evidence from life on
Earth supports a variety of paths leading toward intelligence. Our
searches for life elsewhere are informed by such insights into life here.’
Christopher Chyba, Stanford University and the SETI Institute
Life’s Solution
Inevitable Humans in a
Lonely Universe
simon conway morris
University of Cambridge
  
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Cambridge University Press
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© Simon Conway Morris 2003
2003
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For Zo
¨
e, with love

Contents
Preface. The Cambridge sandwich page xi

Acknowledgements xvii
List of abbreviations xix
1. Looking for Easter Island 1
Inherency: where is the ground plan in evolution? 5
The navigation of protein hyperspace 8
The game of life 10
Eerie perfection 13
Finding Easter Island 19
2. Can we break the great code? 22
The ground floor 23
DNA: the strangest of all molecules? 27
3. Universal goo: life as a cosmic principle? 32
A Martini the size of the Pacific 33
Goo from the sky 34
Back to deep space 38
A life-saving rain? 42
4. The origin of life: straining the soup or our
credulity? 44
Finding its path 47
Problems with experiments 49
On the flat 53
Back to the test tube 58
A sceptic’s charter 63
5. Uniquely lucky? The strangeness of Earth 69
The shattered orb 69
Battering the Earth 71
The Mars express 75
viii contents
Making the Solar System 77
Rare Moon 87

Just the right size 92
Jupiter and the comets 93
Just the right place 99
A cosmic fluke? 105
6. Converging on the extreme 106
Universal chlorophyll? 106
The wheels of life? 111
Fortean bladders 112
A silken convergence 115
Matrices and skeletons 117
Play it again! 120
Attacking convergence 126
Convergence: on the ground, above the ground, under
the ground 134
7. Seeing convergence 147
A balancing act 148
Returning the gaze 151
Eyes of an alien? 158
Clarity and colour vision 166
Universal rhodopsin? 170
Smelling convergence 173
The echo of convergence 181
Shocking convergence 182
Hearing convergence 190
Thinking convergence? 194
8. Alien convergences? 197
Down in the farm 198
Military convergence 200
Convergent complexities 205
Hearts and minds 214

Honorary mammals 218
Giving birth to convergence 220
Warming to convergence, singing of convergence,
chewing convergence 223
contents ix
9. The non-prevalence of humanoids? 229
Interstellar nervous systems? 230
The conceptualizing pancake 231
The bricks and mortar of life 234
Genes and networks 237
Jack, the railway baboon 242
Giant brains 243
Grasping convergence 261
Converging on the humanoid 264
Converging on the ultimate 271
10. Evolution bound: the ubiquity of convergence 283
Ubiquitous convergence 284
Respiratory convergence 287
Freezing convergence, photosynthetic convergence 290
The molecules converge 295
Convergence and evolution 298
Converging trends 304
A possible research programme 308
11. Towards a theology of evolution 311
An evolutionary embedment 312
Darwin’s priesthood 314
Heresy! Heresy!! 318
Genetic fundamentalism 323
A path to recovery? 326
Converging on convergence 328

12. Last word 331
Notes 333
Index 446

Preface. The Cambridge
sandwich
Writing in the New York Review of Books,
1
John Maynard Smith,
one of Britain’s greatest biologists, remarked ‘If one was able to
re-play the whole evolution of animals, starting at the bottom of the
Cambrian (and, to satisfy Laplace, moving one of the individual
animals two feet to its left), there is no guarantee – indeed no
likelihood – that the result would be the same. There might be no
conquest of the land, no emergence of mammals, and certainly no
human beings’.
2
This review, written with characteristic flair and
economy, was addressing three books on evolution, two by S. J.
Gould and the third by E. Mayr. Maynard Smith was raising this
issue because both the authors under review have been forthright in
claiming that the emergence of human intelligence during the
course of evolution has a vanishingly small probability. The logic of
the argument, that because we are unique on this planet then
nothing like us can occur elsewhere, is gently checked by Maynard
Smith: ‘This argument seems to me so manifestly false that I fear I
must have misunderstood it’.
3
However, he, Mayr and Gould, and I
imagine almost anyone else, would agree that the likelihood of

‘exactly the same cognitive creatures – with five fingers on each
hand, a vermiform appendix, thirty-two teeth, and so on’
4
evolving
again if, somehow, the Cambrian explosion could be rerun is remote
in the extreme.
What, however, of the emergence of more general biological
properties? In considering some earlier views of R. C. Lewontin, who
was uncertain as to whether ‘general principles of biological
organization’
5
existed, Maynard Smith was more upbeat: ‘In seeking
a theory of biological form, I would probably place greater emphasis
than Lewontin on the principles of engineering design. I suspect that
there are only a limited number of ways in which eyes can possibly
work, and, maybe only a limited number of ways in which brains
can work. But I agree that it would be good to know whether such
principles exist, and, if so, what they are’.
6
Even though neither
Lewontin nor Maynard Smith thought ‘A description of all the
xii preface. the cambridge sandwich
organisms that have ever been’
7
could settle this issue,
8
Life’s
Solution sets out to demonstrate that what we already know gives
some strong indicators of what must be: even in this book pigs
don’t fly.

The central theme of this book depends on the realities of
evolutionary convergence: the recurrent tendency of biological
organization to arrive at the same ‘solution’ to a particular ‘need’.
Perhaps the best-known example is the similarity between the
camera-like eye of the octopus and the human eye (or that of any
other vertebrate). As we shall see in this particular instance, where
the camera-like eye has evolved independently at least six times,
Maynard Smith’s premise that ‘only a limited number of ways in
which eyes can possibly work’ is amply confirmed. If this book
happens to serve no other purpose than act as a compilation of
evolutionary convergences, be it head-banging in mole rats and
termites or matriarchal social structure in sperm whales and
elephants, then that will be sufficient. But, of course, the net is in
pursuit of a much bigger prey. Its main, but not ultimate, aim is to
argue that, contrary to received wisdom, the emergence of human
intelligence is a near-inevitability. My purpose is not to demonstrate
the inevitability of a five-fingered organism, although in this context
it is amusing to note that the famous panda’s ‘thumb’ is, in one
sense, convergent.
9
Nor is it my aim to find repeated examples of
species with 32 teeth, even though we might note that there are a
number of fascinating examples of dental convergence. And it is this
that matters, not five of this or 32 of that, but the recurrent
emergence of various biological properties.
This book has its anecdotes, from baboons operating railway
signals to a harbour seal that spoke like an inebriated Bostonian, but
there is a serious argument that takes us from the apparently arcane,
such as the natural (and convergent) gyroscopes of insects, through
to the convergences of the sensory modalities (vision, of course, but

also olfaction, hearing and echolocation, electroreception, and so on)
to agriculture, brain size, and culture. And there are four
conclusions. First, what we regard as complex is usually inherent in
simpler systems: the real and in part unanswered question in
evolution is not novelty per se, but how it is that things are put
together. Second, the number of evolutionary end-points is limited:
by no means everything is possible. Third, what is possible has
preface. the cambridge sandwich xiii
usually been arrived at multiple times, meaning that the emergence
of the various biological properties is effectively inevitable. Finally,
all this takes time. What was impossible billions of years ago
becomes increasingly inevitable: evolution has trajectories (trends, if
you prefer) and progress is not some noxious by-product of the
terminally optimistic, but simply part of our reality.
There is, however, a paradox. If we, in a sense, are
evolutionarily inevitable, as too are animals with compound eyes or
tiny organelles that make hydrogen, then where are our equivalents,
out there, across the galaxy? After all, the Milky Way has been
available for colonization for at least a billion years, so in Enrico
Fermi’s famous words concerning putative extraterrestrials: ‘Where
are they?’ To paraphrase much of this book, life may be a universal
principle, but we can still be alone. In other words, once you are on
the path it is pretty straightforward, but finding a suitable planet and
maybe getting the right recipe for life’s origination could be
exceedingly difficult: inevitable humans in a lonely Universe. Now,
if this happens to be the case, that in turn might be telling us
something very interesting indeed. Either we are a cosmic accident,
without either meaning or purpose, or alternatively
Enough of backgrounds; what specifically is this book about?
Here is a brief outline. Overall it is a sandwich. The central meat on

convergences is in Chapters 6 to 10, flanked by thinner expositions
in the form of the first five chapters and two end chapters, the last
very short indeed. So, the first two chapters are introductory. They
look at two extraordinarily effective biological systems. The first
concerns the genetic code, how the building blocks of protein, the
amino acids, are read off the DNA. This code is eerily effective,
indeed it has been argued to be ‘one in a million’. This raises the
question of how life navigates to such precise end-points, an analogy
being how the Polynesians in the great diaspora across the Pacific
ever managed to find that remote speck of land that we call Easter
Island. This is followed in the second chapter by a consideration of
DNA, a molecule of iconic if not totemic significance. But for all its
familiarity, DNA also turns out to be one of the strangest molecules
in the Universe. A rather useful invention.
The next two chapters (3 and 4) consider how easy it is to
make the molecules necessary for life, but paradoxically how
difficult it is to make life itself. To some the universality of organic
xiv preface. the cambridge sandwich
material, from immense interstellar gas clouds rich in carbon
compounds to questing bipeds plodding around out-of-the-way
planets, almost suggests the cosmos ‘breathes’ life; a Universe
seeded with vital possibilities. Maybe so, but the trillion upon
trillion tonnes of interstellar organics may still be a universal ‘goo’.
To be sure, they could be the essential ingredient for getting life
started in terms of basic supplies, but the question of just how
inanimate became animate has proved stubbornly recalcitrant. It
should all be rather simple, especially if you worship at the crowded
shrine of self-organization. Yet, somewhere, somehow the right
question has not yet been asked, and not for want of trying.
So confident, however, is the majority that the emergence of

life is a pre-ordained inevitability that the question of whether
beyond the Earth there are any planetary homes available has only
recently emerged. Thus Chapter 5 looks at what we know of the
many peculiarities of our Solar System. Planets there will be aplenty,
but suitable abodes for organic evolution might require very special
sets of circumstances. This is an area that has been reviewed by such
workers as Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee
10
and Stuart Ross
Taylor,
11
but here I take the argument further as the ferment of
discussion continues.
Chapters 6 to 10 are, as already mentioned, the heart of the
book. They effectively track the story of evolutionary convergence,
starting with the classic cases familiar to biologists as well as some
very intriguing experiments, using bacteria, which allow
evolutionary history to be rerun. That provides a framework of a sort,
but the goal is to argue for the inevitable emergence of sentience.
This is achieved by first (Chapter 7) looking, in some detail, at the
sensory modalities. Eyes provide a superb story, but so too in their
different ways do such features as balance, hearing, olfaction,
echolocation, and electrogeneration: all are rampantly convergent.
These complex systems can arise from very different starting
positions, but again and again converge on the same evolutionary
solution. Chapters 8 and 9 develop the story by seeing how certain
features that we believe are peculiarly human, such as agriculture,
human brains, and even advanced culture are each convergent.
This is not, emphatically, to say that humans are the only
evolutionary outcome worth considering: clearly they are not. And

preface. the cambridge sandwich xv
this leads to the last two chapters (10 and 11), and a brief coda
(Chapter 12). Too often evolutionary convergence is regarded as
simply anecdotal, good for a bedtime story. Its importance is surely
underestimated, and for two reasons. The first is scientific. Ideas on
evolution about such features as adaptation and trends have been
under fierce attack, especially by those who believe that if
contingent happenstance dogs every step of evolution then assuredly
the emergence of humans is a cosmic accident, leaving us free to
make the world as we will, with such happy results as are plain to
see. Yet convergence tells us two things: that evolutionary trends are
real, and that adaptation is not some occasional cog in the organic
machine, but is central to the explanation of how we came to be
here. In principle, such ideas are in themselves so unremarkable as
to require no comment, were it not for the ferocious attacks by such
writers as S. J. Gould. What, one wonders, did he get so excited
about, and how, one may ask, has our understanding of evolution
really changed despite more than forty years of polemic?
Yet, convergence also opens another door. If the emergence of
our sentience was effectively inevitable, then perhaps we should
take rather more seriously the sentiences of other species? So too
perhaps we should stand back and consider what a very odd set-up it
is we inhabit, from the eerily efficient genetic code, to the deeply
peculiar molecule DNA, to a set of biological organizations that
repeatedly throw up complex structures, not least the brain. The late
Fred Hoyle, no friend of most biologists, carried some strange ideas
about the origins of biological complexity to his grave, yet his
remark that the Universe was a set-up job rings strangely true.
Having said that, if you happen to be a ‘creation scientist’ (or
something of that kind) and have read this far, may I politely suggest

that you put this book back on the shelf. It will do you no good.
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. To deny, however, the reality of evolution and more seriously
to distort deliberately the scientific evidence in support of
fundamentalist tenets is inadmissible. Contrary to popular belief,
the science of evolution does not belittle us. As I argue, something
like ourselves is an evolutionary inevitability, and our existence also
xvi preface. the cambridge sandwich
reaffirms our one-ness with the rest of Creation. Nevertheless, the
free will we are given allows us to make a choice. Of course, it might
all be a glorious accident; but alternatively perhaps now is the time
to take some of the implications of evolution and the world in which
we find ourselves a little more seriously. If you haven’t put Life’s
Solution back on the shelf, please read on.
Acknowledgements
‘To copy one paper is plagiarism, to copy many is scholarship’: few
academics are unfamiliar with one or other version of this gentle
jibe. Moreover, given that my one area of vague scientific knowledge
concerns fossil worms from the Cambrian it will be self-evident that
to have been able to write this book I am heavily dependant on the
expertise, knowledge, and enthusiasm of hundreds of workers. For
this reason I have drawn upon a number of their quotations, which
are of course fully acknowledged. This is not to say that the
researchers I have cited would necessarily agree with the overall
theme of Life’s Solution, but I trust that in each case the context is
clear and fair. Thus I hope that a book that flits from extraterrestrial
amino acids to dolphin brains, from the eyes of spiders to the
discovery of a Roman terracotta head in pre-Columbia Mexico, or

Francis Galton calculating by smells, is understood as an exploration
along a common theme rather than simply a jumble of half-digested
facts. So first I must acknowledge the many authors whose work I
have drawn on liberally. So too I thank the following friends for
reading one or other section, and in a few cases the entire draft at
one stage or another. Thus I record my gratitude to the following
friends: Ken Catania, Stephen Clark, Rob Foley, Stephen Freeland,
Jack Lissauer, Ken McKinney, Lori Marino, Ulrich Mueller, and Nick
Strausfeld for their detailed critiques. In addition, many other
colleagues provided illustrative material (also acknowledged in
specific figures), particular insights, and information. Again, I am
most grateful, and specifically I thank Rachelle Adams, Tim
Bayliss-Smith, Curtis Bell, Yfke van Bergen, Quentin Bone, Graham
Budd, Hynek Burda, John Chambers, Jenny Clack, Rod Conway
Morris, James Crampton, Cameron Currie, Nick Davies, Eric
Denton, Laurence Doyle, Doug Erwin, Albert Eschenmoser, Richard
Felger, Russ Fernald, Larry Field, Siegfried Franck, Adrian Friday,
Linda Gamlin, Liz Harper, Carl Hopkins, Ken Joysey, Harvey Karten,
Jeyaraney Kathirithamby, Richard Keynes, Kuno Kirschfeld, David
Kistner, Mike Land, Charley Lineweaver, Ken McNamara, Charles
xviii acknowledgements
Melville, Eviator Nevo, Dan Nilsson, Euan Nisbet, David Norman,
Ray Norris, Beth Okamura, Art Popper, Christopher Pynes, Simon
Reader, Neill Reid, Michael Ruse, John Taylor, Nigel Veitch, Tom
Waller, Michael Wilson, and Rachel Wood.
It is oxymoronic to say that the mistakes that remain are
mine: of course they are. Nor can I promise that everything is up to
date; it can’t be, nor are my references intended to be exhaustive;
they aren’t. I hope, however, they are sufficient for the interested
reader to begin to explore the literature.

The source of this book was the invitation by Trinity College,
Cambridge, to deliver the Tarner Lectures for 1999, and I thank the
Master and Fellows, especially Boyd Hilton, for their encouragement
and support. I owe an enormous debt to several other people. First, I
wish to thank wholeheartedly Sandra Last for her patience and
stamina as smoothly and flawlessly draft after draft emerged. Next, I
owe a debt of gratitude to the University of Cambridge and
especially the Department of Earth Sciences, for allowing me time
for such an enterprise. I also specifically wish to thank Sharon
Capon and Dudley Simons for assistance with drafting and
photography, and also to acknowledge the superb libraries in many
departments, the University Library, and the unfailingly helpful
librarians. So, too, I give thanks to Cambridge University Press,
especially Sally Thomas, Alison Litherland, and Robert Whitelock,
and to Bruce Wilcock and his skills in disentanglement.
In one way or another, support has been provided by my
college in Cambridge, St John’s, the Leverhulme Foundation, the
SETI Institute, NASA–Ames, and the Royal Society. Finally, I want
to thank my wife Zo
¨
e for her interest as I droned on about star-nosed
moles, dolphin brains, or electric fish. To maintain such an attention
span tells me something rather important, and to her I dedicate this
book.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs
for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at
the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no
responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site
will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Abbreviations

general
ATP adenosine 5

-triphosphate, the triphosphate of the
nucleotide adenosine, which plays a key role in the
energetics of the cell. See also p. 25.
BP before the present; by convention taken as before 1950.
CHZ the Circumstellar Habitable Zone, the zone surrounding a
star in which the evolution of life is both possible, and can
be maintained for protracted intervals of time. See also pp.
83, 99–100.
DNA deoxyribonucleic acid, the nucleic acid that forms the basis
of genetic inheritance in nearly all organisms. See also
pp. 4, 23–24.
EOD electric organ discharge; the discharge of electricity from
specialized tissues in fish. See p. 184.
IDO the enzyme indoleamine 2,3-dioxygenase.
JAR jamming avoidance response, exhibited by fish that use
electrogeneration. See p. 186.
K/T the boundary between the end of the Cretaceous (K) period
and the beginning of the Tertiary (T) era at about 65 Ma
ago. The K/T event that occurred at this time resulted in a
mass extinction. See pp. 94–95.
LPTM the late Paleocene thermal maximum, a warm interval that
occurred during the Paleocene period at c.55Ma.
OZMA (Project) the first radio-telescope project to search for
extraterrestrial signals, so named by Frank Drake in
reference to organisms as strange as the Wizard of Oz. See
p. 231.
PAHs polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons; organic compounds with

a carbon “network” that are abundant in the Universe. See
p. 43.
xx list of abbreviations
RNA ribonucleic acid, a polynucleotide that conveys genetic
information to the proteins in the cell. There are three
forms: messenger RNA (mRNA), ribosomal RNA (rRNA),
and transfer RNA (tRNA). See also pp. 4, 13, 44.
SETI the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. See pp. 231–232.
TNA threo-nucleic acid. See pp. 52–53.
UV ultraviolet; electromagnetic radiation in the range between
visible (violet) light and X-rays, i.e. with wavelengths from
about 400 nm to 4 nm. Ultraviolet radiation is invisible to
the human eye, but not to many animals.
some abbreviations for units
Length
cm centimetre, one-hundredth of a metre (0.3937 inch)
m metre (39.37 inches)
km kilometre, 1000 metres (approx. 0.621 mile)
nm nanometre, 10
−9
metre, i.e. one millionth of a millimetre
(0.03937 millionths of an inch).
AU astronomical unit, equal to the mean distance of the Earth
from the Sun; 1.496 × 10
8
km or approx. 93 million miles.
Mass
g gram (0.03527 ounce)
kg kilogram, 1000 grams (2.2046 pounds)
Time

s second
Ga billion years (10
9
years)
Ma million years (10
9
years)
Frequency
Hz herz, frequency per second
kHz kiloherz, 1000 Hz
MHz megaherz, 10
6
herz.
list of abbreviations xxi
Temperature
◦
C degree Celsius (0
◦
C is the freezing point of water, 100
◦
Cis
the boiling point of water).
K temperature on the Kelvin (thermodynamic) absolute scale
(with 0 K as absolute zero); 1 degree K = 1 degree C; 0
◦
Cis
about 273 K and 100
◦
C is about 373 K.
Pressure

Pa Pascal, SI unit of pressure, equivalent to the pressure
produced by a force of one newton applied (uniformly) over
an area of one square metre; 10
5
Pa (100 kPa) is equivalent to
1 bar, or roughly 1 atmosphere.

1 Looking for Easter Island
I am a bipedal hominid, of average cranial capacity, write my
manuscripts with a fountain pen, and loathe jogging. Thanks to years
of work by innumerable biologists I, or anyone else, can tell you to
a fair degree of accuracy when the ability to walk upright began, the
rate at which our brain increased to its present and seemingly aston-
ishing size, and the origin of the five-fingered forelimb whose present
versatility allows me to hold a pen, not to mention the fishy origin of
those lungs that make such a noise as the joggers pass me early in the
morning on Cambridge’s Midsummer Common.
It is obvious that the entire fabric of evolution is imprinted on
and through our bodies, from the architecture of our bony skeleton,
to the proteins carrying the oxygen surging through our arteries, and
our eyes that even unaided can see at least two million years into the
past – the amount of time it has taken for the light to travel from the
Andromeda Galaxy. In every case – whether for hand or brain – we can
trace an ancestry that extends backwards for hundreds of millions, if
not billions, of years. Yet, for all that, both the processes and the impli-
cations of organic evolution remain controversial. Now at first sight
this is rather odd, because it is not immediately clear what is being
called into question. Certainly not the fact of evolution, at least as a
historical narrative: very crudely, first bacteria, then dinosaurs, now
humans. More specifically in terms of process, Darwin’s formulation

of the mechanisms of evolution is not only straightforward, but seem-
ingly irrefutable. Organisms live in a real world, and evolve to fit their
environment by a process of continuous adaptation. This is achieved
by a constant winnowing through the operation of natural selection
that scrutinizes the available variation to confer reproductive success
on those that, by one yardstick or another, are fitter in the struggle for
survival.
So is that all there is to say? The recipe for evolution just given
is a decidedly bald summary. One intuitively senses that it is an in-
herently feeble response to an extraordinarily rich history that has
brought forth an immense coruscation of form and diversity. Among
2 looking for easter island
living forms this ranges across many scales of complexity, from bac-
teria that build colonies like miniature trees
1
to immense societies
of ants whose populations run into the millions and, independent of
us, have stumbled across the advantages of agriculture (Chapter 8).
And it is a history that is by no means confined to the complex-
ity of colonies or the limpidity of a geometric shell. It is as much
in the range, scope, and acuity of living organisms. They may be
mere machines, but consider those owls whose hearing can pinpoint
within a two-degree arc the rustling made by a mouse,
2
the naviga-
tional abilities of albatrosses across the seemingly trackless South-
ern Ocean
3
(Fig. 1.1), or even Nellie the cat that smelled Madagascar
across more than two hundred miles of ocean.

4
But despite our admi-
ration, wonder, and – if we are candid – even awe, surely we can still
offer the following paraphrase: evolution happens, this bone evolved
from that one, this molecule from that one. To be sure, not every
transformation and transition will be elucidated, but we are confi-
dent this is because of a lack of information rather than a failure of the
method.
Yet despite the reality that, as it happens, we humans evolved
from apes rather than, say, lizards, let alone tulips, the interpretations
surrounding the brute fact of evolution remain contentious, contro-
versial, fractious, and acrimonious. Why should this be so? The heart
of the problem, I believe, is to explain how it might be that we, a prod-
uct of evolution, possess an overwhelming sense of purpose and moral
identity yet arose by processes that were seemingly without meaning.
If, however, we can begin to demonstrate that organic evolution con-
tains deeper structures and potentialities, if not inevitabilities, then
perhaps we can begin to move away from the dreary materialism of
much current thinking with its agenda of a world now open to lim-
itless manipulation. Nor need this counter-attack be anti-scientific:
far from it. First, evolution may simply be a fact, yet it is in need
of continuous interpretation. The study of evolution surely retains its
fascination, not because it offers a universal explanation, even though
this may appeal to fundamentalists (of all persuasions), but because
evolution is both riven with ambiguities and, paradoxically, is also
rich in implications. In my opinion the sure sign of the right road is
a limitless prospect of deeper knowledge: what was once baffling is
now clear, what seemed absurdly important is now simply childish,
yet still the journey is unfinished.