British - Scientist | 1951 -
Most of the tree of life is effectively arranged.
Simon Conway Morris
LifeTreeTree Of LifeMostArranged
If you go to the octopus, and if you're not too squeamish, dissect it. You'll find that it has a camera eye which is remarkable similar to our own. And yet we know that the octopus belongs to an invertebrate group called cephalopod mulluses, evolutionarily very distant indeed from the chordates to which we belong.
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The common ancient ancestor of mulluses and chordates could not possibly have possessed a camera eye, so quite clearly they have evolved independently. The solution has been arrived at by completely different routes.
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The manner in which life constructs itself must be dealing with some other principle which we've failed to identify.
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Pikaia is a missing link because, of all chordates, it's probably the most primitive.
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I would argue that in any habitable zone that doesn't boil or freeze, intelligent life is going to emerge because intelligence is convergent.
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As a number of people have stressed over the years, I think it would be premature to assume science itself will explain everything.
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Scientists have wonderfully explained the organization of the universe, but that's really all it claims to do, and I think it does that very successfully.
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I think the intellectual consistency of Christianity in historical evidence is frankly overwhelming, but my materialist colleagues regard me as a slightly sad case.
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