The assassin’s bullet misses, the Archduke’s carriage moves forward, and a catastrophic war is avoided. So too with the history of life. Re-run the tape of life, as Stephen J. Gould claimed, and the outcome must be entirely different: an alien world, without humans and maybe not even intel[...]

How did human beings acquire imaginations that can conjure up untrue possibilities? How did the Universe become self-aware? In "The Runes of Evolution," Simon Conway Morris revitalizes the study of evolution from the perspective of convergence, providing us with compelling new evidence to support th[...]