If life were to start again, would evolution take the same path, and would intelligent, complex, social beings - such as humans - emerge? This hotly debated issue in the life sciences will be discussed next week at the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, when two leading experts in the field present contrasting perspectives on the inevitability of human evolution.

The debate is fundamentally about the nature of evolution. Stephen Jay Gould, for example, suggested that if the tape of life were replayed, it would turn out entirely differently. Others have argued that the constraints of selection and adaptation are such that similar outcomes would arise, including intelligent life.

Setting out this view next week will be Simon Conway Morris, Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology at Cambridge and the author of Life's Solution, a book in which he sets out his support for the theory of convergent evolution.

"The prevailing view of evolution is that life has no direction - no goals, no predictable outcomes. Hedged in by circumstances and coincidence, the course of life lurches from one point to another. It is pure chance that 3 billion years of evolution on Earth have produced a peculiarly clever ape," he has written.

"This is wrong. The history of life on Earth appears impossibly complex and unpredictable, but take a closer look and you'll find a deep structure. Physics and chemistry dictate that many things simply are not possible, and these constraints extend to biology. The solution to a particular biological problem can often only be handled in one of a few ways ... Organisms faced with the same challenge repeatedly arrives at the same solutions - this is evolutionary convergence."

An alternative to Conway Morris's views will be set out by Ian Tattersall, Curator of Anthropology at the American Natural History Museum in New York, who has written extensively on the patterns and processes of human evolution, including the best-seller Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness.

The event will begin at 4pm on Wednesday, March 3 in the Babbage Lecture Theatre, New Museum Site, Cambridge, and will be followed by a general discussion. All are welcome.

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