Beshrew my heart but I pity the man. Final reflections on From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds by Simon Conway Morris

I've reviewed a few books over the years here at Quintessence of Dust, but From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution by Simon Conway Morris was the first book I blogged through that I was genuinely excited about reading. I bought it sight unseen, new and in hardcover, from a publisher of dubious reputation, because I was beguiled by the author and the title and what I mistakenly believed that title to mean. I have already written that I regretted paying money for the book once I read the first couple of chapters and realized I'd been had. From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds isn't about myths, nor is it about interesting controversies, and its ideas/claims are mostly recycled from previous works by the author. In retrospect, the book didn't merit the attention I gave it, and it doesn't merit yours.

David Strathairn and Sophie Marceau as Theseus and Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999)

But that doesn't mean I regret the exercise as a whole. Writing my way through the book helped me clarify some of my own thoughts and ideas. So this post is as much about me and my ideas as it is about the book.

Reviewing From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds by Simon Conway Morris: Full series

Full series on From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution by Simon Conway Morris.

Introduction and overview

Chapter 1: The Myth of No Limits — Part 1 — Part 2

Chapter 2: The Myth of Randomness

Chapter 3: The Myth of Mass Extinctions

Chapter 4: The Myth of Missing Links

Chapter 5: The Myth of Animal Minds — Part 1 — Part 2

Chapter 6: The Myth of Extraterrestrials

Final comments and reflections

Do not infest your mind with beating on the strangeness of this business. Chapter 6 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds

ALONSO: This is as strange a maze as e’er men trod,
And there is in this business more than nature
Was ever conduct of. Some oracle
Must rectify our knowledge.

—The Tempest, Act 5, Scene 1 

That's one of two epigraphs at the beginning of Chapter 6 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution, "The Myth of Extraterrestrials," by Simon Conway Morris. It seemed odd to me when I started reading the book, but it makes some sense now that I've made it to the end. Conway Morris wants (or needs) there to be more to this business than nature "was ever conduct of." This final chapter makes that clear, and by that I mean that it makes the author's desire/need clear. It is, sadly, a fitting end to the book.

Recall that Life's Solution, the author's 2003 book that made convergence a household word, is subtitled Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. The notion that our species (or something very much like it) is "inevitable" is (in my view) a reasonable conjecture once one is faced with the pervasiveness of evolutionary convergence. I enjoyed that book when I read it all those years ago, and became convinced that evolution was not merely blundering around finding the weird and wonderful—it was algorithmically churning toward design, and then toward better design. I was then in a Christian world where it seemed that "adaptationism" was a Bad Thing embraced by extremists and (oh god) atheists, but here was a rock-star Christian paleontologist who was all in on adaptation. I loved that rebel vibe, then and now. But then, and also now, I was baffled by his apparent desire to be alone. Not alone in his office, but alone in the universe.

A gruesome autopsy of Chapter 5 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds

Before I explain the rot at the heart of this chapter (Chapter 5 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution, "The Myth of Animal Minds," by Simon Conway Morris), I'd like to show you my workspace as I sullenly trudge toward the end of this task.

That's my fun little Chromebook 2-in-1, and the barely-visible tartan mouse pad is from my dad. You'll see my toolkit of sticky notes and a stack of (some of) my books on consciousness and human cognition. Conway Morris' book is open to the pages (155-157, in a section called "An unbridgeable gulf?") that stopped me in my tracks.

The author doth protest too much, methinks. The disastrous Chapter 5 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds

It's one of the most famous misquoted lines in the English language, spoken by Lady Gertrude (Hamlet's mom) during the intense scene featuring a play ("The Mousetrap" aka The Murder of Gonzago) within a play, intended by Hamlet to be "the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King." The character in "The Mousetrap" has delivered some sappy lines about commitment and widowhood, designed to flush out the King and Gertrude. But you know all that. The frequently-mangled line is "The lady protests too much, methinks." It's a great line and it works out to something like "she's overdoing it" spoken by a person who is literally the subject being portrayed. When we say "the lady doth protest too much" we usually mean "they're overacting so much that now it seems even they don't believe what they're saying."

That's how Chapter 5 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution, "The Myth of Animal Minds," felt to me. Simon Conway Morris is hellbent on digging a conceptual moat around human cognition, desperate to isolate it from non-human cognition so that it can receive metaphysical shipments from on high. If that sounds harsh, it is—and it is exactly what the chapter is about.

Missing links are a myth, but whose? Chapter 4 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds

There are some truly vexing and annoying myths of evolution. They are almost exclusively recited and embellished by religious propagandists, some of whom actually know what they're doing. Rarely but notably, there are myths that are gleefully repeated by creationists while being amplified by scientists who should know better. The clearest example of this is the mythology and nonsense surrounding "junk DNA."

Missing links are not an example of this.

The phrase "missing link" is so dated and so scientifically laughable that it could only be seriously discussed in a book about myths that circulate among laypeople who watch YouTube videos about Sasquatch, refuse vaccines to own the libs, and go to church. What is it doing in a book by Simon Conway Morris, a book that claims to address "areas of received wisdom that are long overdue for careful reexamination"? It's the subject of the fourth chapter of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution, "The Myth of Missing Links."

The Mórrígan. A myth.

This question summarizes one source of my deep disappointment in this book, a work that has lowered my opinion of its author. I have no right to blame my disappointment on the author, and I know that my feelings betray an expectation on my part that the professor has no obligation to even consider. That expectation: that Christian scientists acknowledge and consider resisting the mountains of lies that their fellow believers dump into the world.

Mass extinction as acceleration: Chapter 3 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds

If you read about natural history, even just popular accounts, you know about the epic mass extinctions visited on the living world throughout life's tenure on Earth. Words like 'devastating' and 'catastrophic' barely capture their scale—the most thorough purge is called The Great Dying and extinguished at least 95% of the species on the planet. And this isn't just animals dying. It's whole lineages dying. As our host writes, these things are "extremely nasty and most definitely to be avoided."

It's tempting to picture these epochs as the erasure of worlds, with new worlds taking their place. Lots of death means lots of vacant niches means lots of opportunity, for animal lineages to expand and diversify, and for humans to weave gripping tales of fortune and fate. Or even myths. If, like me, you read this book to learn about myths of evolution, you had to slog through two chapters of chaos and blather to get to something that finally resembles one.

The third myth in From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution by Simon Conway Morris, the subject of Chapter 3, is "The Myth of Mass Extinctions." The chapter is long and detailed, clogged with taxonomic jargon in places, sparkling with typical mischief in others. (Page 76: "Not for a moment am I suggesting that the early Triassic is a preferred destination for the time traveler. Your tour group would be greeted by shocking scenes, but the cognoscenti would see which way the wind was blowing.") By now we know we have to ask: what exactly is the myth? Conway Morris isn't questioning the occurrence of mass extinctions, nor does he doubt their apocalyptic power. He's attacking a somewhat specific view of their effects on the biosphere.

Confusion and convergence, but no "myth of randomness." Chapter 2 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds

The concept of randomness is caught up in evolution, in two broad ways. The first and most famous aspect is the oft-misunderstood randomness of mutation. The second aspect is the role of chance in the trajectory of evolution. It is this question—is evolution predictable, or is it a random "drunkard's walk"—that Conway Morris tackles in the second chapter of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution. The chapter is called "The Myth of Randomness."

The chapter is a chaotic mess and ends without a clear argument, much less a convincing one. Conway Morris wants to tip the scales away from "randomness" and toward "cyclicity." From the second paragraph of the chapter (page 43):

Although through geological time increasing degrees of biological complexity and integration are undeniably the case, superimposed on this is an intriguing cyclicity: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. It transpires that evolutionary history is very far from random.

Rincon Mountain Wilderness

Like he did in Chapter 1, Conway Morris takes a profoundly interesting, long-standing question in science, a question that currently inspires brilliant writing and experimentation by evolutionary biologists, and paints one of the possibilities as a "myth." Like he did in Chapter 1, he erects a strawperson. Unlike in Chapter 1, the strawperson is not a laughable nonexistent entity but instead a fuzzy caricature of a major factor in evolutionary history—the combination of chance and contingency. Fortunately, unlike in Chapter 1, Conway Morris provides a poorly integrated amalgam that few laypeople will understand. Thus, even those inclined to cheer the immolation of the strawperson will find little more than stuff like this (p. 56): "The clear implication is that beneath these entirely plausible factors there are deeper organizational principles at work and of which we know very little at present." That sentence is typical of the chapter, which reaches its nadir at an invocation of "particle physics or the periodic table" as evidence that physicists embrace the notion of "a deeper order of the world" while biologists struggle to do the same. In his ardor to preach on these "deeper" things, Conway Morris obscures the grandness of the question and at times distorts what working scientists know and do. It was on finishing this chapter, a few weeks ago, that I regretted buying and reading the book.

What I'm reading in May

One motivation for relaunching Quintessence of Dust was my desire to write about things I'm reading, whether books or articles. So here is the second (late) entry in my new series, What I'm reading, posted at the start of every month.

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Fiction

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman

Continued from April. I only recently read American Gods (I know, I know!) and of course loved it. (I was late to the party but at least I read the "author's preferred text.") My brother's favorite book by Gaiman is Neverwhere, and I'll get there, but I grabbed this nice collection of stories and poems at Bookmans and am almost through.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Recommended by colleagues on our PLOS Slack channel and in a great review at NPR. Plus, as a bardolator I am doctrinally obligated to read a book with a title like that. I'm a little more than halfway through, and LOVE the book.