The Runes of Evolution: How the Universe became Self-Aware, by Simon Conway Morris
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The Runes of Evolution: How the Universe became Self-Aware, by Simon Conway Morris
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How did human beings acquire imaginations that can conjure up untrue possibilities? How did the Universe become self-aware? In The Runes of Evolution, Simon Conway Morris revitalizes the study of evolution from the perspective of convergence, providing us with compelling new evidence to support the mounting scientific view that the history of life is far more predictable than once thought. A leading evolutionary biologist at the University of Cambridge, Conway Morris came into international prominence for his work on the Cambrian explosion (especially fossils of the Burgess Shale) and evolutionary convergence, which is the process whereby organisms not closely related (not monophyletic), independently evolve similar traits as a result of having to adapt to similar environments or ecological niches. In The Runes of Evolution, he illustrates how the ubiquity of convergence hints at an underlying framework whereby many outcomes, not least brains and intelligence, are virtually guaranteed on any Earth-like planet. Conway Morris also emphasizes how much of the complexity of advanced biological systems is inherent in microbial forms. By casting a wider net, The Runes of Evolution explores many neglected evolutionary questions. Some are remarkably general. Why, for example, are convergences such as parasitism, carnivory, and nitrogen fixation in plants concentrated in particular taxonomic hot spots? Why do certain groups have a particular propensity to evolve toward particular states? Some questions lead to unexpected evolutionary insights: If bees sleep (as they do), do they dream? Why is that insect copulating with an orchid? Why have sponges evolved a system of fiber optics? What do mantis shrimps and submarines have in common? If dinosaurs had not gone extinct what would have happened next? Will a saber-toothed cat ever re-evolve? Cona Morris observes: “Even amongst the mammals, let alone the entire tree of life, humans represent one minute twig of a vast (and largely fossilized) arborescence. Every living species is a linear descendant of an immense string of now-vanished ancestors, but evolution itself is the very reverse of linear. Rather it is endlessly exploratory, probing the vast spaces of biological hyperspace. Indeed this book is a celebration of how our world is (and was) populated by a riot of forms, a coruscating tapestry of life.” The Runes of Evolution is the most definitive synthesis of evolutionary convergence to be published to date.
The Runes of Evolution: How the Universe became Self-Aware, by Simon Conway Morris - Amazon Sales Rank: #148460 in Books
- Brand: Morris, Simon Conway
- Published on: 2015-06-22
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 10.00" h x 1.40" w x 7.00" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 528 pages
The Runes of Evolution: How the Universe became Self-Aware, by Simon Conway Morris Review
"The runes of evolution spell out a surprising message: Some evolutionary outcomes are virtually inevitable. Or, so goes the argument of Cambridge palaeontologist Simon Conway Morris, resting on two key premises:
Evolution repeats itself in unexpected ways: Very different lineages evolve to have similar traits. Conway Morris calls this 'convergence.'Precursors of complex traits, such as a nervous system, are found in much simpler organisms. Conway Morris calls this 'evolutionary inherency.' The premises are supported with a wealth of data—thousands of references across the book’s 27 chapters.The intriguing tale is told by way of a journey over many different areas in which we find convergence and inherency, with touches of humour along the way." —Zachary Ardern, BioLogos
“Conway Morris’s exploration of the phenomenon of convergence in biological evolution is rife with implications for Christian theology. It lends credence to a Christian view of God’s providential action in history, and it supports an ecological view of the interdependence of all things in God’s creation. It also fits with a scriptural account of a story-shaped world.” —Ian Curran, Christian CenturyThis book was presumably written by Morris more for fellow natural scientists than for philosophers and theologians, but in each case so as to prove that his hypothesis of ongoing convergence in evolution is not a series of fortuitous coinci-dences but empirical evidence of established patterns or in-built mechanisms within the evolutionary process. Three hundred pages of text with double columns of print on each page and 150 pages of endnotes make that clear. Names of different species, genera, families, orders, classes, and so on turn up on virtually every page so that the nonprofessional reader ends up hunting for summary statements by Morris at the end of each major subdivision within the 26 chapters. Yet despite its obvious density and degree of detail for the ordinary reader, the implications of this book for philosophical/theological understanding of the God–world relationship and for the classic distinction between the natural and the supernatural within creation are in my judgment very significant. —Joseph A. Bracken, SJ, Xavier University, Cincinnati
About the Author Simon Conway Morris is a leading evolutionary biologist and best known for his work on the Cambrian explosion (especially the Burgess Shale) and evolutionary convergence. He is also active in public outreach, especially in the area of science and religion where he also published extensively. A frequent guest on radio, and also with many television appearances, he has pioneered an extremely successful website on convergence (www.mapoflife.org) and is now constructing a new one addressing the wider issues of evolution. Based in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge, where he holds the chair in evolutionary palaeobiology, he is also a fellow of St. John’s College. His work has taken him to many parts of the world, including China, Mongolia, and Greenland.
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18 of 21 people found the following review helpful. An imperfect mixture of biology and philosophy By j a haverstick Our author is the an urbane and witty Cambridge paleontologist, and as with others of the elite from his island he has two last names, "Conway Morris". The island in question is a little north of Europe and called Scingland. Conway Morris is from the southern half it, called England, with which the historically minded reader may be familiar for leaving the planet in a shambles after its colonial ventures a century ago. He made his reputation with his exposition of the famous Burgess shale animals, a reason for me to buy this book. It is published by the Templeton Foundation, an organization with a mixed reputation. It is dedicated to investigating the relationship between science and religion. Conway Morris is a Christian and finds in biology reason to support his religious views. None of this bothers me.The book takes the form of page after page of cases of convergent evolution in (mainly) the animal kingdom. In this sense it has a gee whiz quality as we meet scores of most remarkable life forms. Because he uses terms both biological and taxonomic which are academic, several reviewers have commented on the difficulty of reading it. For me, I was familiar with a lot of it and a Latin and Greek education helps. Just like they said it would in 1950. But anyhow, you really don’t have to stop and look up everything as the jist of what’s being said and the kind of animal involved is almost always clear enough. Additionally, by page 90 I was doing a lot of skimming since the point was by now incredibly obvious: evolution is not a matter of a random walk ( a la Gould) but exhibits a strong"directionality", illustrated by the convergences of features in different organisms. These are ubiquitous because the environment on this planet which different forms of life occupy demand similar solutions. This may strike the reader as somewhat unearthshaking, but as Conway Morris, remarks, it can cause spittle to form on the lips of many evolutionists. And to talk of a "direction" in evolution is pretty unusual. I think C-W makes a provocative case here.These convergences are categorized in the first dozen chapters, teeth, limbs, eyes, and so on. He is at pains to dismiss the assumption that the specific convergences result from deep structure (say of protists) but more generated by environmental factors. As he mentions, however, many of the basic protein forms are already present early on (chrystallins, opsins, etc.).I started paying detailed attention again toward the end when we started to talk about brains and intelligence. That’s what Conway seems to think the goal of the whole shebang is. But you really have to pay attention to the more philosophical remarks dropped in between the expositions every few pages. He’s kind of negative, I think, about creationism and goal oriented evolution. The point seems to be that it’s the environment that presents the constraints which result the general types that many different living things have on this planet. So it’s a curious mix of teleology and determinism, with, it seemed to me, the determinism being the stronger flavor. Even though awareness is the operative goal all along, it's not exactly a vanilla teleology, and that's the point of the case studies. I googled this guy for a little more background. Apparently he is of the opinion that life is rare in the galaxy or universe, I would agree, but that when it does occur it will take forms much like those found here. I would disagree with the latter. Right now, it's just speculation. We don't know anything about what "life" may be possible in other extraterretial locales.I would also remark that the section of color photos of animals in the center of the book seeems to function as just relief from the densly packed prose. I think this is a book that could really have benefitted from line drawings, charts, etc. within the text for some visual help with the exposition, not color animal photos!In his suggested view that life is inevitably targeted at reality becoming aware of itself, well, there are plenty of cowboys at that campfire: Bergson, Whitehead, de Chardin, Schopenhauer, and, wait, who’re they over there in the shadows? Is that Hegel? God, I think I even see some Neo-Platonists at the chuck wagon......The questionof dircetionality/determinism reminded me of some other hotly contested issues: altruism/selfishness; genetic evolution/phenotype evoluution; nature/nurture. Is there some directionality to life on this planet as with all other chemical processes? Or is it all what randomly comes up, snowball earth, meteors..? It all depends on how we define our terms. I'm not sure how much deep science or, worse, metaphysics all this can support. When we get to life elsewhere, this doesn't help at all.And, by the way, if we take Conway Morris' guess to its conclusion, we'll discover that, as he says, the fields of consciousness of organizisms are basically subjective, so how the universe is becoming self-aware is totally a matter of private sensations, isn't it? Is Morris a realist, in the philosophic sense? Am I or a paramecium aware of reality or, as Morris says at one point, "qualia"? Big difference. You might say the universe only is aware of itself thru the veil of maya. A perennial speculation. C-M takes some stabs at this problem in the second to last chapter where he proposes perhaps the most astonishing convergence of all, Plato and Hume. The thinking seems to be that when you, a parrot, a wasp, and I experience ,say, red, we are all seeing the same thing - a universal feature of reality. This is how the universe becomes self-aware. This was a very provocative couple of paragraphs. It's pure philosophy, not biology. I think if our paleontologist would stroll across the green to the philosophy faculty (especially at Cambridge!) he would find it a hard sell, but that doesn't make it uninteresting. I am sympathetic to his readiness to go all the way down with awareness. In fact he even suggests one celled organisms may be aware. If you are a beekeeeper like me, you have no doubt that the bees are as conscious as the keeper is. A nineteenth century biologist, I forget who, remarked that if amoebae would be the size of dogs, we'd be attributing all sorts of mental attributes to them.I think the problem for the reader is whether this a natural history book aimed at enlightening her on the evolutionary subject of convergence or is it a really aimed at proffering a "theory" about the ultimate nature of the universeI? If the former, it’s way too detailed and academic: a list of examples which, as other reviewers have remarked, becomes tedious. If the latter, well, it really needs a lot clearer and convincing argumentation. I honestly believe most hard scientists are a lot smarter than I, but when they - and I include the swarm of books on ultimate physics and second big offender, neoroscience and consciousness - I am usually surprised at how unsophisticated they are. A cool worldview has nothing more to recommend it than the next cool worldview. Much as I enjoyed Conway Morris's guesses at ultimate reality, I'm afraid I'd have to include this book in the scientist-as-amatuer-philosopher genre.But as an old philosophy guy by training and a natural history and evolution buff by inclination, I found this book very thought provoking. If that were my standard, I’d give it a five. The philosophy of biology, which I thought was bit of a poor sister in the philosophy department long ago when it seemed organisms were just bags of chemicals maybe formed by lightning in the ancient atmosphere, has turned out to be a lot more engaging now that we’ve learned so much more in the last 50 yrs. A lot more understanding has led to a lot more mysteries. That’s science, fer ya!Looking at some of Morris' publications, though, I think I’d suggest Life's Solutions or Deep Structure for the reader with a more general interest.
17 of 21 people found the following review helpful. I loved this book. I hated this book. By O. R. Pagan I loved this book. I hated this book.Simon Conway Morris is an accomplished biologist. From what I understand, his main claim to fame for a layperson’s audience was his analysis of fossils from the Burgess Shale, arguably made famous by the late Stephen Jay Gould. In particular, Conway Morris is an evolutionary biologist with a deep interest on the phenomenon of evolutionary convergence (EC), and this book is an embarrassment of riches as far as examples of EC is concerned. I immensely enjoyed the wide variety of examples and I have to say that I learned quite a few new things. The book is well-documented and thorough if nothing else. The endnotes section is a good 155 pages long! I was rather amused when I saw that the first two endnotes of the ***Introduction***, which were approximately 2 1/4 and 3 pages long respectively! Forgive me if I am ignorant in these matters, but I think footnotes and endnotes should be short. The notes in this book must be some kind of a record or something. This is a minor point though. Overall, I enjoyed the book.However… there are a few negatives that didn’t let me enjoy this work to the fullest. For example:**The writing style is convoluted, and I do not mean technical or scientific, in fact, the material does not warrant a degree in evolutionary biology or even in the hard sciences. The thing is that as one of the other reviews in the “…azon” site said, you need a dictionary to look for terms quite frequently. This took some of the pleasure away because one almost cannot read in a steady flow. It is almost as if the author’s attitude was something like “…look at me, aren’t I erudite?” He is famous enough to need this validation, so the reason for this style is a mystery to me.**How many times does the word “coruscant” or “coruscating” is needed in a single book?**Because of the above points, this book is a puzzle to me because it is not overtly technical, yet it is certainly not for the casual science reader either. Ironically, I had a much better time with his previous book, “Life’s Solution”, an explicitly scientific book on the same topic.**The references were embedded in the endnotes rather than alphabetically, which made really annoying to look for a specific reference, and a science no-no.**There were quite a few typos liberally distributed throughout the book, including an unforgivable and particularly irritating one that I noticed by chance in the index: “Puerto Rica” instead of “Puerto Rico”, which happens to be the place I was born at … (:-)…**There were several allusions to less than kind book reviewers. Preemptive strike or the were the reviewers the reason why this ostensibly scientific book was not published by a university press?**On that note, the publisher, Templeton Press, explicitly fosters an understanding between science and religion, which is great! But in some places within the text, the author flirts with the possibility that consciousness (whatever that is), is “accessed” rather than “produced” by nervous systems, a point that will surely lead to less than kind scientific reviews, particularly from neuroscientists.**I was hopeful and excited to read chapter 21 on neurobiology. He mentioned flatworms and several points on the evolution of the nervous system. However, I was disappointed not to see my own popular science book listed in the notes or anywhere else (I admit to some ego bruising there), because I made use of some of the examples that the author used, and my book was published more than a year ago by a well-known university press, so I do not think that it was that bad …**The subtitle “How the universe became self-aware” was not alluded at all in the book (did I miss it?).Overall, The Runes of Evolution is full of fascinating information, but its style and execution took some luster off it. It is not a book for the typical science enthusiast who may be interested in this matter.
10 of 12 people found the following review helpful. Can't wait for the Sequel! By Darrel R. Falk With thousands of references, this book is a veritable encyclopedia--full of examples of convergent evolution in biological history. In essence, the history of life can be thought of as a huge set of parallel searches exploring design-space and arriving at optimum structures and physiologies necessary to carry out particular tasks in a manner that maximizes reproductive capacity. Each search through design-space is limited in some manner by structural and physiological constraints imposed by each lineage’s specific history. Over and over again, Conway Morris demonstrates, the searches yield similar solutions, albeit each with it’s own peculiar tint, a reflection of its previous evolutionary history. The eye of the octopus and the eye of the vertebrate, for example, are amazingly similar, even though they each bear certain trademark differences--a result of the very different trajectories taken to arrive at the same solution. The process by which parallel pathways lead to similar end solutions is called convergent evolution. This book is likely the most complete summary of the collection of life's converging systems ever written. No one has examined the question as broadly or as thoroughly as Conway Morris: There are a limited number of solutions to design-problems and repeatedly, ancestral lineages independently come up with almost the same biological solution to the same ecological challenge.Written in Conway Morris’s inimitable low key style and generously sprinkled with examples of his subtle humor, it is almost possible at times to forget that one is reading a highly sophisticated scientific review. But at those times, no sooner does one break into a full smile or even an out-loud chuckle, that Conway-Morris throws in a taxonomic term or the name of some complicated molecule. With that, we’re back to reality-- a sort of reminder that we’re actually sitting at the feet of one of the world’s most knowledgeable experts learning detailed intricacies of events set in motion hundreds of millions of years ago. The book is a joy to read--likely the first time, I've ever found myself laughing out loud while reading a book heavily embedded in animal taxonomy. Indeed, I doubt it will ever happen again.Conway Morris has a knack for revealing the *real* purpose in writing his books in his sub-titles. For example, for his other especially noteworthy book, he chose the sub-title, “Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe.” It is not clear on the basis of the scientific evidence presented in that book that the arrival of humans on earth was inevitable. In fact, based on scientific data alone, most evolutionary biologists would say the complete opposite: humans are here by luck. Humans only arose once and, as a species, they are highly unique. How does one measure the probability of a singularity? But Conway Morris goes against the grain and there is more to his thinking than biology alone—although that the real shaping of that grain, he barely addresses. This time he has chosen the sub-title, “How the Universe became Self-Aware.” So the book is really, in Conway Morris’s mind, about the development of consciousness. This is interesting since he says very little (nothing, actually) about theories of consciousness, just as his previous book said very little to directly address the scientific arguments that humans were not inevitable. In this book, Conway Morris makes it clear that he believes in an external reality that is over and above the material reality studied by science. He doesn’t, as I see it, think that consciousness “emerges” from within material reality. Rather, material reality “discovers”, repeatedly discovers actually, this external reality through its search engine. Indeed, he suggests that the reason why little progress has been made (as he sees it!) in understanding consciousness is because it is based in a non-material reality that exists outside of the material reality we study in science. Near the end, Conway Morris makes the following statement:“Suppose mind is not only independent but also preexistent to matter? If that was the case, then evolution is simply the process to discover mind. How then might we distinguish the process of emergence as against discovery? The former seems far more sensible but appears to run into some intractable difficulties. If naturalistic explanations run into a dead end, then does evolution contain any clues as to how the Universe became self-aware? It is the topic of another book, but perhaps a start is to suggest that in the end the natural world lets us down: Paradoxically what we don’t know is more helpful that we believe we do know.”Here again, Conway Morris leaves mainstream science to venture into another realm—other ways of understanding when one is at the boundary of what we can and cannot know through the process of scientific discovery. I’m not sure he’s right in his implication that studies of consciousness have run into intractable difficulties (see, for example, “Consciousness and the Social Brain” by Michael S.A. Graziano). Here he begins to sound like the intelligent design proponents, or the “god of the gaps” advocates from whom he clearly wants to distance himself. However, the really good thing is that Conway Morris hints (in the above quote) that rather than leave the gap in place, the process of beginning to fill it will be the topic of another book. He doesn’t specifically say that the book to start filling the gap will be his own, but given my deep respect for his work, I sincerely hope it is.In any case, given our current knowledge, I don’t think either of Conway Morris’s sub-titles emerge from scientific investigation alone. Science doesn’t show that humans are inevitable and science doesn’t tell the whole story of how the universe became self-aware. There are, however, other ways of coming to know. It is these other ways that point convincingly to the basis of human existence and it is these other ways that give us the deepest understanding of the basis of the universe’s becoming self-aware. There is a great need for someone to elaborate on that within the context of our knowledge about evolution. I, for one, look forward to the next book that Conway Morris hints may already be ruminating in his brilliant mind.
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