Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. We've talked about evolution several times on the podcast in the past few months in this calendar year 2022.

And it's something that we can just keep coming back to over and over again.

And I love talking about it because on the one hand, natural selection, Darwinian evolution, obviously true.

Every scientifically sensible person understands this. It was a tremendous insight that Darwin came up with into how species evolve, how they change over time.

But at the same time, huge controversies rage within the field. You can have a bunch of people who completely agree on the basic outlines of natural selection, but have very, very strong and emotional reactions to individual subquestions within it.

And their real questions are not sort of fake questions and they're not even way out at the speculative periphery. They're right at the heart of the matter.

In the standard model of particle physics, we have a lot of success. It's obviously true and it's domain of dependence. But we don't have a lot of controversy over the big questions.

Like no one's really going to the mat over the value of the fine structure constant or how many quark flavors or colors there are things like that.

Hopefully we'll go beyond the standard model, but the standard model itself is understood.

Whereas in evolution, we can go to very, very basic questions such as the relative role of randomness and luck versus adaptation and convergence.

We had on the podcast my namesake Sean B. Carroll, who is a champion for taking very seriously the idea that there's a lot of randomness and luck that comes into the evolution of life.

If the basic idea being, of course, individual species and populations adapt to their environments and their surroundings and their competition and so forth, but maybe there are a lot of ways that could happen and a lot of ways to get there because the space of possible genomes is incredibly big, way, way bigger than life here on Earth will ever actually explore.

So contingency and randomness and unpredictability play a big role in the actual history of life in this view.

On the other side, we have people who think, look, given the constraints of how organisms and populations survive and flourish within a certain environment, they're going to find very, very similar conclusions.

They're going to design themselves, be designed in this sort of blind watchmaker kind of design sense into more or less what works in that particular regime, and that's going to be the same no matter how you got there.

The adaptationist point of view, and we had our recursion bound and also Richard Dawkins on the podcast recently, those folks are on that side.

Today's guest, Simon Conway Morris, is a distinguished paleontologist and evolutionary biologist who is very much on the adaptationist side of things.

So I guess we're a little unbalanced this year. We have many adaptationists this year, but yeah, that's okay.

It's an interesting question to talk about. And Simon Conway Morris is most well known in scientific circles for his exploration of the Burgess Shail.

This is a fossil bearing deposit that teaches us a lot about the Cambrian explosion. The Cambrian explosion was this moment in evolutionary history when a tremendous number of new species came into existence 500 million years ago, something like that.

And Simon, as I said, is a champion of this view. The evolution is converging on to the best possible solution, even though it might get there from very different ways.

And he has a new book out called From Extra Terrestrials to Animal Minds, Six Myths of Evolution.

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