Convergence; Simon Conway Morris Teleology (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, June 10, 2016, 02:21 (2881 days ago) @ David Turell

A review of Conway Morris and his reliance on convergence to show a pattern of teleology in evolution:-http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnfarrell/2016/06/08/why-teleology-isnt-dead/#381719b073d4-"Yet, as a recent spate of books by scientists suggests, science itself may have room for a new form of teleology, a new way to quantify and grasp a goal-driven directionality in nature, one more robust than the Aristotelian version, but one unafraid to acknowledge a progressive movement in the evolution of life toward consciousness.-***-"Now, in one of the the most recent of such books, The Runes of Evolution, Simon Conway Morris takes a broad view of the tree of life and lays out chapter after chapter of nature's seemingly limitless means of devising the same solutions to life's challenges.-"Conway Morris, a paleontologist at Cambridge University, has long argued that life in the universe is probably very rare—but at the same time, where it does take root, must almost certainly lead to the evolution of consciousness.-"A committed Darwinian, Conway Morris nevertheless disagreed with his fellow paleontologist, the late Stephen Jay Gould, when the latter famously argued that if you could ‘rewind the tape' and start over, the history of life on earth would have been vastly different -and human evolution would never repeat itself. Chance, for Gould, could not be counted on to replay itself for our benefit.-***-"His book is at once a grand survey of critters, from bacteria to puffer fish to octopus, to bats, to macaques and dolphins, all revealing in their own ways different examples of evolutionary convergence: the tendency of evolution to reinvent adaptations independently over and over again.-***-"In the main body of the text, he lays out the various species in whom evolution has invented the same tools over and over. You'll probably need a glossary of zoology to keep up with the author, but Conway Morris' encyclopedic knowledge of species (and the field specialists who track them) is delightfully broad. The notes and bibliography alone take up a third of the entire volume.-"Conway Morris' work is also getting some support at the genetic level: Andreas Wagner, in his recent book Arrival of the Fittest, is researching how—at the most basic level of DNA-evolution is exploring what you might call an ideal Platonic library of genetic pathways just waiting to be realized in life.-"Fascinating to be sure, but in the end, skeptics may ask, what's it all about? Is consciousness really inevitable in the universe?-"Conway Morris has been criticized for subtitling his book ‘How the Universe Became Self Aware'. That much of his work in the discussion of science and religion has been funded by The John Templeton Foundation is also a sore spot for many skeptics. [Full disclosure: I was a Templeton-Cambridge fellow in 2010.] But to my mind, he is simply following in the steps of Carl Sagan, who in the first chapter of his book Cosmos made the same point when he said humans are made of star stuff. “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”-"Such a statement should hardly be controversial. But perhaps if Aristotle were alive today, he'd be enthralled."-Comment: He is committed to Darwin, but enthralled by convergence and I think convergence implies teleology as does the author of the article. A resemblance to Denton's patterns is also at play here. It certainly seems as though advances are patterned in advance within the genome.