Life's Solution
Morris, Simon Conway & Oakes, Edward T.
THE EVOLUTION OF EVOLUTION We•s Solution Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe Simon Conway Morris Cambridge University Press, $29.95, 464 pp. inally, a book on evolution that gets it right....
...Yet since complex formations such as the eye could hardly have come about by mere chance, they must have been designed by a kind of divine foresight, just as a watch requires a clever watchmaker...
...As the subtitle to his book clearly indicates, that is Simon Conway Morris's thesis: "In other words, once you are on the path [of evolution] 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...
...Here is the point anyone who now wants to argue against those two theses will have to take Morris's book into account, which is just why it bears such uncanny similarities to Dar-win's Origin—he has moved the debate to a whole new plane...
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...A transnational network of activists and scholars has pressed, with growing success, to hold global political and economic leaders accountable for their actions...
...The impact of this collision was "just right" to allow the spalledoff material to form the moon, while the rest of the material went to make up a bigger earth, whose size was also crucial for allowing the right kind of skeletal life to evolve later...
...According to the author, our essential moon was midwifed by a most freakish collision of an-other forming planet, roughly the size of Mars, with earth...
...Please send by mail to Lilly Fellows Conference, Department of Political Science, Samford University, 800 Lakeshore Drive, Birmingham AL, 35229, or by email to fmshephe@samford.edu This conference will provide honoraria of $500 to presenters in the concurrent sessions...
...To build and sustain relationships with the dioceses, archdioceses, and religious denominations of the metropolitan New York area, the nation, and the world...
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...Of course if the outcome of evolution were that much of a fluke, then, as the philosopher Daniel Dennett points out in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, the search for intelligent life on other planets would Commonweal 2 8 January 30, 2004 life yet freakishly unlikely: meaning above all the position of the sun in the Milky Way, the orbit and size of Jupiter in the solar system, and the unique way the moon was "untimely ripped" from the bowels of the earth...
...Dennett certainly scores a point when he says that if we are as much of a fluke as Gould would hold, then we have next to no hope of finding intelligent life else-where in the universe...
...For the life-is-inevitable side of his argument Morris plays his most significant trump card, the fact of convergence, that is, the frequency by which certain evolutionary strategies were independently chosen over and over again across a wide spectrum of phyla...
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...When Origin was published in 1859, however, that explanation lost its hold on the scientific public, or so it is claimed...
...In other words, Darwinism is not only compatible with Platonism, it presupposes it...
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...In the midst of this at-times heated debate, one other option gets slighted...
...On the other side of the coin (and ocean), the Harvard botanist Asa Gray rightly recognized that saltation would mean the demise of the theory of natural selection and vigorously defended Darwin while remaining an orthodox Congregationalist, where-as his great rival at Harvard, the zoologist Louis Agassiz, attacked Origin of Species but abandoned the Calvinist reEdward T. Oakes ligion of his Swiss homeland and became a Unitarian...
...Discounts 5 percent, 3 times...
...Still, the moon is no ordinary satellite, says the author, like the other attendant moons in the solar system, which had been formed—as in fact were the earth and other planets as well—by the clustering effect of gravity on asteroids and cosmic dust...
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...Furthermore, the moon's own orbit keeps the earth rotating on a more-or-less stable axis, which would otherwise tilt wildly, like a child's spinning toy top, and cause immense climatic upheavals...
...Examples would be sophisticated vocalizations, vision, echolocation, viviparity, warm-bloodedness, sexual dimorphism, division of labor (even agriculture...
...To be blunt about it, not since Charles Darwin's Origin of Species has a book on evolution managed to marshal so many facts of life—and so many discrepancies in the prior orthodox model for explaining those facts—and then gone on to create a new, more plausible account for how life originated and evolved...
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...Those inspired by Christian teachings and the life of Christ have been an influential part of the global effort to safeguard human rights...
...Fordham University is a Jesuit, Catholic university...
...In other words, if wings evolve over against and in response to air and eyes over against and in response to light, then brains must evolve over against and in response to something like "mental air...
...Session topics may include international and regional movements, denominational challenges and interfaith alliances, human rights in the United States, pedagogical and vocational challenges, and issue-related crises (such as genocide, women's rights, nationalism and terrorism...
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...The role of these groups, their sometimes clashing goals and interpretations of human rights, their relations to non-Christian human rights groups, and the more general ability of these groups to function in a world in which human rights are still far from universally respected: all of these issues will be explored in this Conference...
...10 percent, 6 times...
...Session proposals on these and related topics are especially welcome...
...In fact the situation was far more complex...
...For example, Thomas Huxley ("Darwin's bull-dog") saw Darwinism as the perfect opportunity to set up a secular religion to rival Christianity but still believed in "saltations," big leaps in evolution to ac-count for the transition from, say, fox to dog, and even claimed that "there is a "A recent Harvard study says humans have 98 percent of our DNA...
...Still, if intelligence is well-nigh inevitable, does not such inevitability say something about the inherent nature of the universe: if humans were so inevitable from the start, why all the sneers from devout Darwinians at man as an insignificant worm in the cosmic slime...
...and, as with the example of the extinction of the dinosaurs from the impact of a meteor, we already know how much damage can follow in the wake of even rare impacts...
...By that admittedly metaphorical term I mean those a priori ideal structures already part of the universe that make a mathematics-capable brain possible in the first place...
...Fordham is an equal opportunity/affirmative action institution...
...Re-view of applications will begin January 15, 2004...
...Edward T. Oakes, SJ, is Chester & Margaret Paluch Professor of Theology at the University of St...
...MA Theology, University of San Francisco, summa cum laude...
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...and an ecclesial vision that will pro-vide leadership to a faculty that is committed to meeting the needs of an emerging Church...
...Now celebrating its fortieth anniversary, the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education is one of the eleven schools of Fordham University, the oldest Catholic institution of higher learning in the North-east, and the largest Jesuit university in the United States...
...and of course most crucially, larger and more complex brains...
...Abstracts of 500-750 words for papers and panels should be submitted by March 15, 2004...
...Professor of evolutionary paleobiology and earth sciences at the University of Cambridge, Morris has marshaled an enormous amount of evidence to support both prongs of his thesis (the footnotes take up about one-fifth of the book, and he seems to have read every article in every refereed journal of science...
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...The language of human rights has become deeply embedded in international discourse...
...Prior to Darwin nearly everyone took it as perfectly obvious that the giraffe's long neck was "made for" reaching vegetation in tall trees, that the eye was "made for" seeing, and so forth...
...In depicting the religious instinct as a mixture of irrational fundamentalism The Stations of the Cross in Verse A WALKING MEDITATION FOR LENT...
...Five- or three-day retreats, 20 minutes north of San Antonio...
...It seldom seems to strike the ultra-Darwinists that theology might have its own richness and subtleties, and might—strange thought—actually tell us things about the world that are not only to our real advantage, but will never be revealed by science...
...This announcement invites paper submissions for concurrent sessions...
...The position will begin in July 2004...
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...wwwsabbathretreats.org ically limp, drawing on cliches, and happily fuelled by the idiocies of the so-called scientific creationists...
...But it can also be that intelligence is as built into the logic of evolution as Dennett says it is—and yet we can still be alone...
...The Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education offers a doctoral degree in Religious Education, as well as master's degrees and professional diploma pro-grams in Religious Education, Spirituality and Spiritual Direction, Pastoral Ministries, and Pastoral Counseling and Spiritual Care...
...and wish-fulfillment they seem to be simply unaware that theology is not the domain of pop-eyed flatearthers...
...Christianity and Human Rights" will explore the role of Christians in the movement to preserve human rights around the globe...
...Although such a "Darwinian Platonism" is not part of the thesis of Morris's epochal book, I cannot but think that something like that metaphysic forms the conclusion of his work, for in the last two chapters he turns his guns on the Samford University Program Description...
...Well, we want it back...
...As the chief academic officer, the Dean leads the faculty of the School in strategic planning, program development and implementation, and assessment...
...No doubt both sides of his thesis—that life-friendly planets are rare, perhaps even unique, but that once life gets up and running intelligence is inevitable—are eminently debatable...
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...For more information, look for our website at www.samford.edu/lillyhumanrights CALL FOR PAPERS Samford University and the Lilly Fellows Program Announce Christianity and Human Rights Thursday 11 November–Sunday 14 November, 2004 Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama PLENARY SPEAKERS Robert Drinan, SJ • Jean Bethke Elshtain John Witte • James Waller The Fourth Annual Lilly Fellows Program National Research Conference Commonweal 29 January 30, 2004 Darwinian materialistic atheists ("ultra-Darwinists" in his terminology) and de-livers a fierce polemic against their anti-Christian bias, a bias he rightly calls quasi-religious in its fervor ("Richard Dawkins is arguably England's most pious atheist," he quips): Notwithstanding the quasi-religious enthusiasms of ultra-Darwinists, their own understanding of theology is a combination of ignorance and derision, philosophC L A S S I F I E D Journalist Online STRICTLY PERSONAL—BUT YOU ARE invited to take a look: www.aepwall.com www.annerice.com Have We Fallen Away from God and Nature...
...With the faculty, to develop the School as a preeminent institution which provides its students with a theologically sophisticated program of pastoral training...
...Because Darwinism gave a new ex-planation for how and why each organ-ism is so well adapted to its environment, this enormous record of convergence surely must say something as well about the environment...
...15 percent, 12 times...
...ARAGONbe as pointless as a search for extraterrestrial kangaroos...
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...Mary of the Lake in Mundelein, Illinois, the seminary of the Archdiocese of Chicago...
...Roughly speaking, his defense of the lonely-universe side of his argument depends on features of the solar system which, he claims, are both necessary for F wider teleology, that is not touched by the doctrine of evolution...
...Thus, in order to drive home the point that evolution has no goal and that humans are a complete fluke, the late Harvard professor Steven jay Gould insisted that if we rewound the tape of evolution and started the whole process over again, the chances would be vanishingly small of evolution producing, yet one more time, the same roaches and sharks, tulips and mushrooms, humans and crabs, that we know today...
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...The whole point of such a search rests on the assumption that evolution will inevitably tease out the potential for intelligence already lurking, however embryonically, in the pre-biotic chemical soup of other life-bearing planets...
...Even avid Darwinians were not so sure...
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...As I say, finally a book on evolution that gets it right...
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...These cat fights among the Darwinians continue right down to today...
...In other words, the fact that so many biological forms developed photosensitive cells and then eyes (or their equivalents) also testifiesto the ubiquity of light, just as the fact that wings developed independently on insects, birds, bats, some dinosaurs, and so forth, testifies to the density and viscosity of the atmosphere of the earth...
...S/he will be able to build relationships between and among the School and the University, the Church, and the denominations and faith communities rep-resented by a student body drawn from areas throughout the nation and around the world...
...Without Jupiter's size and position, he argues, the earth would have been bombarded too often with asteroids...
...www.luckyface.org/writings Dean, Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education FORDHAM UNIVERSITY INVITES nominations and applications for the position of Dean of the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education...
...To justify them I must first rehearse the discrepancies that bedevil the Darwinian account of evolution, above all that pesky question of teleology...
...The successful candidate will have a demonstrated commitment to the goals and ideals of Catholic and Jesuit education...
...So too with complex brains: to be adaptive, brains have to evolve in response to the environment...
Vol. 131 • January 2004 • No. 2
