From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds Six Myths of Evolution

Cambridge palaeobiologist Simon Conway Morris is always ready for some good-spirited provocation and mischief. Here he dissects six supposed myths of evolution, providing a thought-provoking mix of ideas. I found as much to agree as to disagree with.

The first four chapters deal with evolution more widely. The first myth, that evolution has no limits, is a bit of a straw man though. I hope that no biologist seriously advocates this: the constraints of physics have long been recognized and the concept of fitness landscapes is almost a century old. Even so, he throws up interesting ideas here. Life, it seems, has been complex from a very early stage, readily swapping genes and entering into symbioses; "this genetic turmoil would help to explain why recovering a genealogy of descent has proved so difficult, if not actually impossible" (p. 14). Looking back in time we encounter what has been dubbed a "phylogenetic event horizon", a barrier beyond which we cannot see, much like the cosmological one.

A recurrent and thought-provoking idea in this book is that there is a deeper architecture to evolution. Evolution can be thought of as life endlessly probing the hyperdimensional space of all possible options. Many combinations are theoretically imaginable, but few are biologically viable. This is why convergent evolution happens, with life hitting on similar solutions time and again. These concepts also apply to the next myth, that of evolution as a completely random process. A deeper architecture to evolution "may predispose particular chains of causality to be particularly recurrent" (p. 57–58). In other words, convergent evolution traces the outlines of constraints, raising the intriguing idea that biological hyperspace is "dotted with inevitable destinations" (p. 52). Though one can object that, within these constraints, evolution still gravitates towards optimal solutions in a random fashion.

Next up are the myths of mass extinction and missing links. Mass extinctions happen, but rather than radically redirecting evolution, they merely accelerate what was going to happen anyway. Conway Morris observes that groups that came out on top afterwards were "already moving into pole position ahead of the catastrophe" (p. 75). But is this a profound insight or mere tautology? Are you not effectively saying that those species that radiated into newly opened ecological niches were those species that were best situated to radiate into these niches? What does not help is that, when discussing mammal evolution, his language is somewhat sloppy. Despite his assurances that he does not think that early mammal groups formed a simple scala naturae, "principal lineages tended toward an increasing degree of "mammalness"" (p. 86) and "the thrilling project of "Let's Make a Mammal" was already well underway by the late Permian" (p. 87). This strikes me as counting the hits and ignoring the misses and then marvelling at the route evolution took to get here. Several recent books discussing early mammal evolution show a younger generation of scientists be more accurate but no less poetic in their metaphors. Missing links are another interesting case, though exactly what the myth is here is never entirely clear. If I understand him correctly, he argues that, rather than a chain of missing links, you observe a swarm of evolutionary experiments all tending in the same direction.

I found much more to disagree with in the next two chapters. Conway Morris provocatively argues that the difference between animal and human minds is not one of degree after all. Discussing mental states, tool use, teaching, language, mathematics, and music, he admits that animals have considerable cognitive chops but that humans really do stand apart. My impression is that he is a tad too sure in denying animals certain cognitive abilities. I am not fond of human exceptionalism, and I will readily quote both Safina and De Waal on why I think we have underestimated animals. However. I cannot deny he has a point. The gap between animals and humans is real and we do not find anything resembling human-level cognitive skills in other species. At the end of this chapter, Conway Morris asks why we are alone; why, even if there was a significant factor X that triggered the fuse of human cognitive evolution, no other species has followed suit. Perhaps, rather than concluding that human intelligence does not readily evolve, we should conclude that it readily does not evolve. Justin Gregg's new book If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal offers a suitably amusing riposte, arguing that non-human animals simply do not need it to be successful.

At this point, I feel it is incumbent on me to highlight two points. First, Conway Morris is a man of (Christian) faith and you might wonder whether his talk of a "deeper architecture" to evolution implies there has to be an architect. This book is absolutely not pushing Creationism or Intelligent Design, nor trying to smuggle God in (not even through the backdoor). And yet. The second point is that Templeton Press is affiliated with the Templeton Foundation, a philanthropic organisation that supports research at the intersection of science and spirituality. The last chapter shows that Conway Morris does have some unorthodox ideas. He considers the search for extraterrestrial intelligence endlessly futile and the Fermi paradox not so much wrong as irrelevant. Why? He has a metaphysical perspective on the nature of reality. Humans, as story-telling animals, have started to literally enter new realities, orthogonal to our own, where we are far from alone. What we call paranormal phenomena and UFOs are part of those orthogonal realities bleeding over into ours on occasion, he contends. "And these regions have many features that will not please the materialists" (p. 219). But tutting at materialism is a sleight of hand. The reason I, and likely many other scientists, do not engage with these ideas has rather to do with empiricism. If your ideas do not generate testable predictions or are not empirically verifiable (an objection Conway Morris mentions here) we effectively enter the realm of postmodernism where there is no objective truth and we have no means which to come to a mutually agreeable understanding of how the world works.

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.