Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.uk.

I hope you enjoy the program.

Hello, the Evolutionary biologist the late Stephen J Gould argued that if you re-ran the tape of

evolutionary history, an entirely different set of creatures will emerge.

Man wouldn't exist because the multitude of random

changes that resulted in us would never be repeated in exactly the same way. Others

disagree, arguing that there's a pattern that points to some kind of direction, even perhaps a

design, a sense that some things are ordained to be.

Who were the original proponents of the idea of a grand design?

Were they deliberately setting out to find a scientific

theory that could sit alongside religious faith?

On the other hand, can the concept of contingency or the randomness of evolution be compatible

with the pattern we see or with a belief in God.

With me a Simon Conway Morris professor of evolutionary paleobiology at Cambridge University

and author of The Crucible of Creation, The Burgess Shale and The Rise of Animals,

Sandinap, botanist at the Natural History Museum,

and John Brooke, Andreas Indiress Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University.

Simon Connolly Morris, can you set out the range of arguments, as it were, to sort of headline the program

surrounding the issue of design?

Well, certainly the problem is that at the basic level evolution has to be a

random process because we know that the way in which organisms are selected

through time is effectively on the basis of random mutation.

...