Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface. The Cambridge sandwich
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Looking for Easter Island
- 2 Can we break the great code?
- 3 Universal goo: life as a cosmic principle?
- 4 The origin of life: straining the soup or our credulity?
- 5 Uniquely lucky? The strangeness of Earth
- 6 Converging on the extreme
- 7 Seeing convergence
- 8 Alien convergences?
- 9 The non-prevalence of humanoids?
- 10 Evolution bound: the ubiquity of convergence
- 11 Towards a theology of evolution
- 12 Last word
- Notes
- Index
7 - Seeing convergence
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface. The Cambridge sandwich
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Looking for Easter Island
- 2 Can we break the great code?
- 3 Universal goo: life as a cosmic principle?
- 4 The origin of life: straining the soup or our credulity?
- 5 Uniquely lucky? The strangeness of Earth
- 6 Converging on the extreme
- 7 Seeing convergence
- 8 Alien convergences?
- 9 The non-prevalence of humanoids?
- 10 Evolution bound: the ubiquity of convergence
- 11 Towards a theology of evolution
- 12 Last word
- Notes
- Index
Summary
If I enter a dark wood and happen to hear a woodpecker hammering at a tree, I at least have the potential satisfaction of knowing that here in deed are two unique products of evolution – human and woodpecker – or so it would appear. The example of the woodpecker is often presented as one of the best examples of evolutionary uniqueness, with its specific adaptations that enable it to make percussive attacks on trees. The corollary that follows is that the evolutionary process will lead to other unique end points: on this planet, as it happens, woodpeckers and humans; somewhere else, life, but no woodpeckers, no humans. It may be centuries, if ever, before we can test the latter supposition, but this may not be necessary. Here on Earth the history of life can unfold many times, especially on isolated islands and microcontinents. In Madagascar, for example, there are no woodpeckers, but another group of birds, the vangids, is identified as a ‘true substitute’. Nor might this be the only example of convergence on a woodpecker. To be woodpecker-like does not automatically mean you have to be a bird, and three groups of mammals have, in a number of different ways, converged on a woodpecker-like habit. To be sure, nothing precisely like a woodpecker has evolved independently, but broad biological generalities still arise. So, too, in an analogous way, can we say humans are really unique? As we shall see in Chapter 9, again much is convergent.
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- Information
- Life's SolutionInevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe, pp. 147 - 196Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003