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Life's Solution Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe by Simon Conway Morris Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003 486 pp., $19.99 paper

Simon Conway Morris is a distinguished scientist with a professorship in evolutionary paleobiology at Cambridge University. In Life's Solution, he enters the debate on the direction of evolution. Is it indeed a random affair that might well have turned out differently, as many orthodox Darwinians argue, or was the emergence of intelligent, self-reflective beings built into the process from the start? Conway Morris' answer is suggested by his subtitle: "Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe."

The central theme of Life's Solution is biological convergence. "Convergence" here refers to a counterintuitive result from evolutionary biology. When organisms share some feature, the first impulse of evolutionary biologists is to attribute the similarity to evolution from a common ancestor. Similarity is thus explained as a common inheritance.

Not every feature of biological similarity, however, can be attributed to descent from a common evolutionary ancestor. Indeed, biologists have shown that organisms can share a feature of similarity and yet have no common ancestor that exhibited that feature. This means that in the evolution of organisms sharing such a feature, the feature had to be reinvented separately on a number of occasions. This is biological convergence, and Conway Morris documents many fascinating examples of it (in addition to a general index, Life's Solution includes a five-page, double-columned index devoted strictly to convergences).

Biological convergence becomes downright astonishing when the similarity verges on identity. One of the best-known examples of striking convergence is the evolution of the camera-eye in vertebrates and cephalopods (e.g., human and octopus eyes respectively). These eyes are highly complex and almost point-for-point identical (the only obvious difference is the neural wiring—in vertebrates it is backwards, the nuclear layer being in front of the retina, which results in a blind spot). Yet, according to evolutionary theory, humans and octopuses had separate evolutionary precursors of which neither possessed eyes at all. Thus, in the evolution of humans and octopuses, evolution required the reinvention of virtually identical camera-eyes from scratch twice.

This is remarkable. Nor is convergence an isolated, anomalous fact of biology. Rather, it is the norm. Virtually identical biological structures and functions keep getting reinvented, and in ways that cannot be attributed to a common inheritance from a common evolutionary ancestor. Conway Morris documents this fact at length and with awe. It's no accident that "eerie" is one of the most used words in Life's Solution.

But what does this all mean? Why is biological convergence important in the wider scheme of things? Conway Morris belongs to that growing circle of thinkers—others include Paul Davies, Stuart Kauffman, and Michael Denton—who reject the claim that evolution is haphazard. Conway Morris' foil throughout Life's Solution is the late Stephen Jay Gould. If we were to rerun the tape of life, Gould argued in one of his memorable images, nothing need be the same. Not only might humans not exist, but neither organisms with our intelligence nor even organisms as we know them might exist.

Conway Morris, as a Christian theist, resists this view of evolution. The Christian faith teaches that humanity has a privileged place in creation. Even if that creation occurred via evolution, humans are the fully intended product of the divine will.

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