Simon Conway Morris FRS is a British
paleontologist. He was born on 6
November 1951 in Carshalton
, Surrey
and brought
up in London, England. He made his reputation with a very detailed
and careful study of the Burgess Shale
fossils, an exploit
celebrated in Stephen Jay Gould's
Wonderful Life,
though Conway Morris' own book on the subject, The Crucible of
Creation, is somewhat critical of Gould's presentation and
interpretation. Conway Morris is a former student of
Harry Blackmore
Whittington.
He is Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology
in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of
Cambridge
. He is renowned for his insights into early
evolution and his studies of
paleobiology. He gave the
Royal Institution Christmas
Lectures in 1996.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at age 39, was awarded the
Walcott Medal of the
National Academy of Sciences
in 1987 and the Lyell
Medal of the Geological
Society of London in 1998.
Biography
Work
He is
based in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of
Cambridge and is best known for his work on the Cambrian
“explosion”, especially in terms of his study of the famous Burgess
Shale fossil fauna and similar deposits in China and
Greenland. In addition to working in these countries he has
undertaken research in Australia, Canada, Mongolia and the United
States. His studies on the Burgess Shale-type faunas, as well as
the early evolution of skeletons, has encompassed a wide variety of
groups, ranging from
ctenophores to the
earliest
vertebrates. His thinking on
the significance of the Burgess Shale has evolved and his current
interest in
evolutionary
convergence and its wider significance — the topic of his 2007
Gifford Lectures - was in part
spurred by
Stephen Jay Gould’s
arguments for the importance of contingency in the history of
life.
Burgess Shale
His views
on the Burgess
Shale are reported in numerous technical papers and more
generally in The Crucible of Creation (Oxford University Press,
1998). In recent years he has been investigating the
phenomenon of evolutionary convergence, the main thesis of which is
put forward in
Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely
Universe (Cambridge University Press, 2003). He is now
involved on a major project to investigate both the scientific
ramifications of convergence and also to establish a web-site (Map
of Life) that aims to provide an easily accessible introduction to
the thousands of known examples of convergence. This work is funded
by the
John Templeton
Foundation.
Evolution, science and religion
He is known as an effective communicator in the public
understanding of science and has done extensive radio and
television work.
The latter includes the Royal
Institution
Christmas Lectures delivered in 1996. A
Christian, he is also actively involved in various science and
religion debates, including arguments against
intelligent design on the one hand and
materialism on the other. In 2005 he
gave the Second Boyle Lecture. He is an increasingly active
participant in discussions relating to science and religion.
He is
active in the Faraday Institute for Science and
Religion
and has lectured there on "Evolution and
fine-tuning in Biology". He gave the
University of
Edinburgh's prestigious
Gifford Lectures for 2007 in a series titled "Darwin's
Compass: How Evolution Discovers the Song of Creation". In these
lectures he suggests that:
- Evolution shows an eerie predictability, leading to the direct
contradiction of the widely-held view that insists on evolution
being governed by the contingencies of circumstance
- Eyes are not the only example of repeated evolutionary
convergence on the same solution. There is evidence for fundamental
equivalences of sensory perception and the implication that deeper
in the nervous system there is only one mentality. Minds may be not
only universal, but also the same.
- Evolutionary convergence can give us some very strong hints as
to how any aliens will sense their environment, how they will move,
how they will evolve agriculture, and intelligence.
- Humans have passed a threshold that means we now transcend our
animal origins. But birds, whales and humans all converge in song,
and far from being the pinnacle of Creation we may be mere
juveniles.
- The regularities of the physical world , strongly indicate that
there must be universal principles of mind. The evidence from
evolutionary convergence, not least in terms of intelligence and
music, is that the trajectories towards consciousness are embedded
in a universe that in some ways is strangely familiar, where
personal knowledge (to use Polanyi’s phrase)
is valid.
- Any attempt to explain, entirely in naturalistic terms, the
fact that universe can now understand itself seems doomed to
failure. Not only is the Creation open-ended and endlessly fertile,
suggesting that in the future science itself faces an infinity of
understandings, but so too there is good evidence of realities
orthogonal to every-day experiences. Rather than trudging across
the arid landscapes skimpily sketched by the materialists, we need
to accept the invitation and accompany the Artist that brought
Creation into being.
He is a strong critic of
materialism and
of
reductionism:
That satisfactory definitions of life elude us may be
one hint that when materialists step forward and declare with a
brisk slap of the hands that this is it, we should be
deeply skeptical.
Whether the “it” be that of Richard Dawkins’ reductionist gene-centred
worldpicture, the “universal acid” of Daniel Dennett’s meaningless Darwinism, or David
Sloan Wilson’s faith in group selection (not least to explain
the role of human religions), we certainly need to acknowledge each
provides insights but as total explanations of what we see around
us they are, to put it politely, somewhat incomplete.
and of: "the scientist who boomingly — and they always boom —
declares that those who believe in the Deity are unavoidably crazy,
“cracked” as my dear father would have said, although I should add
that I have every reason to believe he was — and now hope is — on
the side of the angels."
In March 2009 he was the opening speaker at the Biological
Evolution Facts and Theories Conference held at the Pontifical
Gregorian University, Rome, as well as chairing one of the
sessions. The conference was aimed at promoting dialogue between
evolutionary biology and Christianity.
Bibliography
Simon Conway Morris has written a number of books on palaeobiology
and evolution, including:
- 1998. The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the
Rise of Animals. Oxford University Press.
- 2003. Life’s Solution: Inevitable humans in a Lonely
Universe. Cambridge University Press.
He also contributed to
Origination of Organismal Form:
Beyond the Gene in Developmental and Evolutionary Biology
with an article entitled:
The Cambrian "Explosion" of
Metazoans.
References
- According to bio sketch at conference on The Nature of Nature
here
- http://www.stmarylebow.co.uk/?download=BoyleLecture05.pdf
- Lecture list
- The points cited are taken from the official abstracts of these
lectures here
- He mentions the Euclidean geometry of three dimensional space
or the three degrees of freedom shown by terrestrial illumination,
and cites Roger
Shepard
- Boyle Lecture — see link below — p8
- ibid. p2
External links
: First Class Honours in Geology (B.Sc.)
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