Professor Simon Conway Morris, Emeritus Professor of Evolutionary Paleobiology in the Department of Earth Sciences and Fellow of St John's College, has received the Templeton Prize for his pioneering work in the field of evolutionary biology.
Valued at more than US$1.4 million - approximately £1.04 million - the prize is one of the world's largest annual individual awards. Established by the late global investor and philanthropist Sir John Templeton, it is given to honour those who harness the power of the sciences to explore the deepest questions of the universe and humankind's place and purpose within it. Past Laureates include Martin Rees, the Dalai Lama and Jane Goodall.
Conway Morris is internationally recognised for his research on the Cambrian explosion - when most major animal groups first emerged in the fossil record - and his analysis of the Burgess Shale formation in Canada. These studies have significantly reshaped our understanding of the early evolution of animal body plans and the dynamics of evolutionary innovation.
His interests extend into astrobiology and a concept known as Fermi's Paradox, which highlights the contradiction between the high probability of extraterrestrial life and the lack of evidence or contact with other civilisations.
"What a journey," said Conway Morris. "As somebody once said, 'Be careful when you step onto the unending road'. A PhD on fossil worms might logically lead to field work in Greenland, but to an absorption with evolutionary convergence and thence the Fermi Paradox? And still the road stretches on, now to the question of human uniqueness and I suspect way beyond."
Conway Morris's most distinctive contribution is the articulation and empirical substantiation of evolutionary convergence - the recurrence of similar biological forms and behaviours across vastly different evolutionary lineages.
Vision and many other sensory organs, as well as wings, fins, and other forms of locomotion, have all evolved numerous times, independently, in different periods of Earth's history. To Conway Morris, these are not just curious coincidences, but evidence of a deeper order to biology that shapes the development of life along specific pathways.
Through a vast body of scholarship, and in his popular books Life's Solution (2003), The Runes of Evolution (2015), and From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds (2022), Conway Morris has shown that evolutionary pathways may be far more constrained and directional than previously assumed. Features like intelligence, even high intelligence, may be a regular outworking of the evolutionary process, no matter how many times we 'wind the tape of life', as fellow scientist Stephen Jay Gould put it, and let it play again.
"What makes Conway Morris abundantly deserving of the Templeton Prize are his groundbreaking advancements on the theoretical foundations of evolutionary theory alongside his commitment to addressing the philosophical implications of that work for humankind," said Timothy Dalrymple, President of the John Templeton Foundation.
Conway Morris was born in 1951 in Carshalton, Surrey, and raised in Wimbledon. At about seven, his mother gave him an album of stamps depicting various prehistoric animals and dinosaurs. This prompted him to go fossil-hunting and inspired a lifelong fascination with the evolution of life.
He earned a BSc with first-class honours from the University of Bristol in 1972 and a PhD from Cambridge in 1976 under the tutelage of palaeontologist Harry Blackmore Whittington. In 1990, at the age of 39, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He has remained at Cambridge for most of his career, and is currently an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences.
His formative work on the Burgess Shale, exploring the emergence of complexity from simpler life forms, laid the foundation for Stephen Jay Gould's 1989 book Wonderful Life, inspiring decades of constructive debate about the relative importance of contingency in evolution and the implications of convergence.
Conway Morris's field-defining work on convergent evolution is the basis of his argument that there is a deeper order to biology that facilitates the development of intelligent life. He is careful to contrast this idea with the Intelligent Design movement, which he has long criticised for purporting that natural processes are insufficient to produce biological complexity, requiring supernatural intervention. Instead, Conway Morris seeks to explain that the universe itself is biophilic, with fundamental natural laws bringing into being the life forms we see today.
A professing Christian, Conway Morris is also highly critical of materialism and reductionism, and has participated in many public debates on religion and science.
His study of the patterns and processes of life on Earth has, in recent years, led to his keen interest in astrobiology - in his words, 'the study of things that do not exist'. This is the interdisciplinary scientific study of the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe.
Despite the vast number of galaxies and potentially habitable planets in the universe, humans have not detected any life beyond Earth - a concept known as Fermi's Paradox.
Conway Morris has proposed several answers to this enigma. Convergent evolution suggests that life elsewhere, if it exists anywhere, may bear similarities to life on Earth. On the other hand, it's also possible that the necessary conditions for the origin of life may be so constrained that life never got started anywhere else.
"Life may be a universal principle, but we can still be alone," he wrote in Life's Solution. Whether life in the universe is abundant, rare, or completely unique remains an open-ended question to further explore.
Continuing to ask such questions is the purpose of the scientific enterprise. In a short film for the Templeton Prize titled Patterns of Life, Conway Morris said: "There's no reason to think that knowledge somehow will reach some sort of terminus. It may be infinite… It's the sense that one is really just scratching the surface of what one may one day know, and that's all one can ask for."
Conway Morris has greatly contributed to public engagement with science through his popular books, lectures, radio, television, and podcast interviews. His notable lectures include the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture in 1996, the Boyle Lecture in 2005, and the six-part series of Gifford Lectures in 2007 on 'Darwin's Compass: How Evolution Discovers the Song of Creation'. In recent years, he has been featured on podcasts such as Sean Carroll's Mindscape and The Michael Shermer Show.
Conway Morris's other recognitions and awards include: the 1987 Walcott Medal of the National Academy of Sciences, the 1989 Charles Schuchert Award from the Paleontological Society, an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University in 1993, the 1998 Charles Lyell Medal of the Geological Society of London, the 2007 Trotter Prize, and the 2010 William Bate Hardy Prize.
He joins a list of 55 prize recipients, including St Teresa of Kolkata (who won the inaugural award in 1973) and the Dalai Lama (2012). The 2025 Templeton Prize was awarded to the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople. Other laureates in the scientific field include Nobel-winning physicist Frank Wilczek (2022), ethologist Jane Goodall (2021), Cambridge cosmologist Martin Rees (2011), and physicist Freeman Dyson (2000).
Adapted from a media release by the Templeton Prize.
