Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe

A controversial challenge to current views of evolution, for the general reader.

The New York Times

Simon Conway Morris's bold new book, Life's Solution, challenges this Darwinian orthodoxy by extending ideas he presented in his Crucible of Creation. He is a booster of inevitability. Replay the tape, he says, and the same broad patterns will emerge. He is also an emphatic adaptationist; he insists on the ubiquity and power of natural selection as a determinant of evolutionary outcomes. Lamarckism is a dirty word in present-day biology, so it is no surprise that Conway Morris does not choose to describe his theory as Lamarckian. But there is an additional reason the L-word goes unspoken in his book. Conway Morris builds his case for the inevitability of numerous evolutionary outcomes mostly on a Darwinian foundation. — Elliott Sober

Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology at the University of Cambridge, he is also the author of The Crucible of Creation (1998, 0198502567).