Evolution - the ultimate search engine.
Thursday 2nd April. The conventional view of evolution sees it adding ever more branches to the tree of life in a random process that has no predictable outcome except the survival of whatever happens to fit its surroundings best. Simon Conway Morris FRS (right), Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology at Cambridge University, has a slightly, though significantly, different view, and the biggest audience of the Darwin & Beyond season so far crammed into the Elwin Room to hear him explain it, in a lecture entitled After Darwin: Where Is Evolution Going? jointly presented by Bath Geological Society and the BRLSI.
Prof Conway Morris's theme was convergence, the phenomenon in which multiple species independently evolve the same characteristics, including some fairly important ones such as the eye (evolved seven times at the last count). This leads him to counter the "but for chance" theory that says, for example, that an earlier extinction of a particular early Cambrian organism would have cut short the evolutionary chain that eventually led to humans, erasing us from history.
Instead he suggests that perhaps there is "deeper organisational set of rules" which define a relatively small set of viable developments, and that evolution is actually the process of searching for them, albeit in fairly (although perhaps not totally) random way. So if one ancestor of Homo Sapiens had failed to evolve another would have led to us instead, because we're one of the outcomes that evolution is pre-ordained to find.
It was challenging stuff, especially for 'true' Darwinians, but helped along by the biggest dose of humour seen in a formal Darwin lecture so far - the image of 50 waterskiers, allegedly Prof Morris's team heading for a conference in Venice, will stay in the mind for a while. And it kept the audience, on a warm Spring evening in a rather warmer Elwin room, glued to their seats.
Prof Conway Morris's theme was convergence, the phenomenon in which multiple species independently evolve the same characteristics, including some fairly important ones such as the eye (evolved seven times at the last count). This leads him to counter the "but for chance" theory that says, for example, that an earlier extinction of a particular early Cambrian organism would have cut short the evolutionary chain that eventually led to humans, erasing us from history.
Instead he suggests that perhaps there is "deeper organisational set of rules" which define a relatively small set of viable developments, and that evolution is actually the process of searching for them, albeit in fairly (although perhaps not totally) random way. So if one ancestor of Homo Sapiens had failed to evolve another would have led to us instead, because we're one of the outcomes that evolution is pre-
It was challenging stuff, especially for 'true' Darwinians, but helped along by the biggest dose of humour seen in a formal Darwin lecture so far -
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Prof Simon Conway Morris: "Evolution is a search engine"
EVENT REPORT - AFTER DARWIN: WHERE IS EVOLUTION GOING?
Elizabeth Devon, Chair of Bath Geological Society, with Professor Simon Conway Morris
