Destinies: Fate, Chance, And The Fut... — Improbable

On the other side, Conway Morris argues that natural selection is so powerful that it inevitably finds the same "solutions" to environmental problems. If an environment needs a fast swimmer, it will eventually produce something like a shark, a dolphin, or an ichthyosaur—independently. Testing the "Improbable" in the Real World

If you could rewind the history of Earth—every volcanic eruption, every meteor strike, every random mutation—and press "play" again, would the world look the same? Would we still have humans, or would the planet be dominated by bipedal dinosaurs?

In his compelling book, , evolutionary biologist Jonathan Losos explores this profound question. By examining the tug-of-war between contingency (random luck) and convergence (predictable patterns), Losos offers a new lens through which to view our place in the cosmos. The Great Debate: Gould vs. Conway Morris

Beyond the ivory tower, Losos’s insights have vital real-world applications:

From studying how fruit flies adapt to alcohol to the domestication of Russian silver foxes, Losos illustrates that evolution can happen much faster than Darwin ever imagined—often in just a few generations. Are Humans Inevitable?

The book centers on a legendary scientific disagreement between two titans of biology:

While these were once purely philosophical thought experiments, Losos shows that we can now test them using . He takes readers from laboratory flasks to remote islands to meet the scientists "rewinding the tape" in real-time: