Everything about Simon Conway Morris totally explained
Simon Conway Morris FRS is a
British paleontologist. He was born in
1951 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 aged 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's 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
Steven 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's 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. 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 currently accepted wisdom 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's 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 that'll move, how that'll 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's 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've every reason to believe he was — and now hope is — on the side of the angels."
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.Further Information
Get more info on 'Simon Conway Morris'.
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