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the discussion
Join
ISCID from March 15th through May 23rd for an online discussion
of the latest book by Cambridge palaeobiologist,
Simon Conway Morris.
 In Life's
Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe Morris
argues both that evolution is constrained and that its outcome
is inevitable rather than wholly contingent. To defend this position,
Morris catalogues a large number of evolutionary solutions that
have
been
arrived at
independently
in various organisms. These evolutionary convergences make up
the meat of Morris' contention that evolution may indeed have
a direction.
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 Christmas lectures in 1996. His work on Cambrian
soft-bodied faunas has taken him to China, Mongolia, Greenland and
Australia.
Order
the book "Life's Solution" for $21.00 at Amazon.com
Reading and Discussion Schedule:
Week Beginning March 15th
- Preface:
The Cambridge Sandwich
- Chapter One:
Looking for Eastern Island
Week
Beginning March 22nd
- Chapter Two:
Can we break the great code?
Week
Beginning March 29th
- Chapter Three:
Universal Goo: life as a cosmic principle?
Week
Beginning April 5th
- Chapter Four:
The origin of life: straining the soup or our credulity?
Week
Beginning April 12th
- Chapter Five:
Uniquely lucky? The strangeness of Earth
Week Beginning April 19th
- Chapter
Six: Converging on the extreme
Week
Beginning April 26th
- Chapter Seven:
Seeing convergence
Week
Beginning April 26th
- Chapter Eight:
Alien convergences?
Week
Beginning May 3rd
- Chapter Nine:
The non-prevalence of humanoids?
Week
Beginning May 10th
- Chapter Ten: Evolution
bound: the ubiquity of convergence
Week
Beginning May 17th
- Chapter
Eleven: Towards a theology of evolution
- Chapter
Twelve: Last word
Related Books:
The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals
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