Mesozoic butterflies seem to have appeared so similar to todayвЂ™s incarnation that at a few paces youвЂ™d probably not notice a difference. Note the fossil in panel (e) above, and the uncanny resemblence of the underwing to the tailfin of the WWII B-17 Flying Fortress bomber. 2014 Reconstruction of the kalligrammatid lacewing Orogramma illecebrosa on the plant Williamsonia, feeding from a cone. Not the butterflies we see flitting around today from the Order Lepidoptera, but floating, flapping, nectar-sucking flibbertigibbits nonetheless, with wings adorned with eyespots, veins, and scales. But Conway MorrisвЂ™s arguments have surely received a boost froma a striking example of convergence that has become newly clear over the last few years, most recently in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B but also a few years ago in BMC Evolutionary Biology.ДЄpparently, way back when Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, a group of insects called lacewings produced butterflies. It is a fun question to think about (particularly in a bar over drinks), if ultimately unanswerable. Another example that comes to my mind are the trilobites, although one might make a case for the giant isopods as trilobites, Take 2. On the other hand, Peter Bowler, a reviewer writing about Conway Morris's book Crucible of Creation for American Scientist, argued that Conway MorrisвЂ™s arguments are persuasive until you consider that many successful creatures seem to have no other parallel in Earth history вЂ“ kangaroos, for instance. And indeed, there are countless examples of such convergent evolution: dolphins and ichthyosaurs, cactuses in the Americas and euphorbias in Africa, and placental and marsupial saber toothed tigers. In other words, the environment induces the evolution of more or less the same solutions (though small details may obviously be different) when unrelated groups of organisms move into the same environments.

Such a process, he argued, inevitably results in the emergence of beings with high intelligence. Early evolution of complex life in the form of the Ediacaran and Cambrian explosions produced scads of bizarre creatures related to nothing alive today and many went extinct, probably, due to nothing more than bad luck.Д¬onway Morris argued yes: without any sort of goal, the unchanging laws of physics and demands of EarthвЂ™s environments dictate that more or less the same creatures would and have evolved repeatedly on Earth.

Not only would life be radically different, the odds are strong that nothing similar to humans would have evolved. 2014Д«iologists Steven Jay Gould and Simon Conway Morris famously butted heads over a simple thought experiment: if we were to вЂњrewind the tapeвЂќ of life and allow it to play out again, would we get the same result?

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