Evolution Wants Something

Simon Conway Morris, was a student of Steven J Gould, and considered him to be his hero. He was a devout Christian, and came to the opposite view of Gould, that evolution does have purpose. He described what he referred to as "evolutionary convergence" and documented examples of biology achieving very similar means, such as eyes.

Kevin Kelly, author of the book "What Technology Wants" gave a great talk at Google about this book arguing for this view.

In it he enumerates some of the trends or things that are improving in both biology, and now in the 'technium' which include:

• Diversity
• Specialization
• Mutualism (co-dependency)
• Ubiquity
• Sentience
• Resolvability
• Exotropy

Although, some of us believe he misspelled that last one, and that it should be Extropy. Yet perhaps Extropy is a more general word that includes all of these?

There are atheists in the Gould camp, such as Daniel Dennett, but a good example of a popular atheist in this camp is Richard Dawkins and of course many of the supporters of this camp are atheist as can be seen with the Atheist canonizer algorithm selected on the side bar.

Early on in his career, Darwin refereed to a "moral progress" in evolution, but later on avoided such terminology. (reference?)