Simon Conway Morris

Emeritus Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology, Cambridge

Darwin’s Compass: How Evolution Discovers the Song of Creation

In his series of lectures, Morris expands on his 2005 Boyle Lecture, exploring the predictability of Darwinian evolution. Arguing that the biological outcomes observable on Earth have universal applications, he asserts that convergence is central to evolutionary theory. While humans have transcended their Darwinian roots, we have yet to understand the mechanism of our own consciousness or the eschatological dimensions of evolution. 

Biography

Simon Conway Morris was born 6 November 1951 in Carshalton, England. A proponent of theistic evolution, he is known for his study of the Burgess Shale and the Cambrian Explosion. Research Fellow at St John’s College, Cambridge in 1976, he was appointed Lecturer at the Open University in 1979. He returned to Cambridge as Lecturer in Earth Sciences in 1983, was appointed Reader in Evolutionary Paleobiology in 1991, and made Professor in 1995, eventually achieving emeritus status. In 1987, he was awarded a Nuffield Foundation Science Research Fellowship. 

Fellow of the Royal Society, he received an honorary doctorate from Uppsala. He was awarded the Charles Doolittle Walcott Medal of the National Academy of Sciences in 1987, the George Gaylord Simpson Prize from Yale in 1992, the Lyell Medal of the Geological Society of London in 1998, the Trotter Prize in 2007, and the William Bate Hardy Prize in 2010. Important works include The Crucible of Creation (1998), Life’s Solutions (2003), The Deep Structure of Biology (2008), The Runes of Evolution (2015), and From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds (2022).

Published/Archival Resources
These lectures have not been published and no archival information is available..