John Farrell at dances around it, pointing at Cambridge’s Simon Conway Morris:
Conway Morris, a paleontologist at Cambridge University, has long argued that life in the universe is probably very rare—but at the same time, where it does take root, must almost certainly lead to the evolution of consciousness.
A committed Darwinian, Conway Morris nevertheless disagreed with his fellow paleontologist, the late Stephen Jay Gould, when the latter famously argued that if you could ‘rewind the tape’ and start over, the history of life on earth would have been vastly different –and human evolution would never repeat itself. Chance, for Gould, could not be counted on to replay itself for our benefit.More.
It’s all basically self-referential garbage, with the usual cocktail sneer. That said:
Yet, as a recent spate of books by scientists suggests, science itself may have room for a new form of teleology, a new way to quantify and grasp a goal-driven directionality in nature, one more robust than the Aristotelian version, but one unafraid to acknowledge a progressive movement in the evolution of life toward consciousness.
Sorry, guys it is still adding up to zero.
See also: Sometimes Denton sounds like a Darwin who got way more right
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