(1951- ) British Invertebrate Paleontologist
Simon Conway Morris gained his initial fame as one of HARRY B. WHITTINGTON’s two graduate students portrayed in STEPHEN JAY GOULD’s book Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History and his career has skyrocketed from there. Beginning with this famous work he began in graduate school on fossils in the Burgess Shale of Canada, he established himself as perhaps the foremost authority on metazoan evolution. These metazoans are arthropods that underwent tremendous evolutionary changes in the late Proterozoic through the early to middle Paleozoic (ca. 700 million to 400 million years ago), which set the stage for the metazoans we see today. His fame continued as he was asked to appear in numerous radio, television, and newspaper interviews. This early media work culminated in his giving the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture in 1996, which was broadcast by the BBC to an audience of about 1 million people in Great Britain. He has appeared on several BBC and NOVA science documentaries, and even written magazine and newspaper articles. His now famous book, Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals, in its seventh printing, began rather discreetly. It was first published in Japan in Chinese. Part of its success is that Conway Morris disputes the opinion of Stephen Jay Gould, who maintained that each step in the history of life is necessary to end up with the life of today, otherwise everything would be different. Conway Morris maintains that within limits, the evolutionary process is more predictable and forms will evolve in certain directions regardless of each step. He is a proponent of widespread convergent evolution, in which animals will tend to evolve toward the most efficient form for a particular environmental niche and therefore look and behave the same regardless of what their ancestors started out as. Sharks and dolphins look very similar but had completely different ancestors; one evolved from fish and the other from terrestrial mammals.
Simon Conway Morris did not come by this respect purely by chance. After he began with the Burgess Shale, he expanded his investigation of early animals and the Cambrian explosion of life worldwide. He studied preskeletal and early skeletal fossils in China, Sweden, Mongolia, Greenland, southern Australia, south Oman, Alberta and Newfoundland, Canada, several places in the United States, and closer to home in Oxfordshire, England. He took this vast paleontological experience and successfully interfaced it with molecular biology, especially in terms of phylogeny and molecular clocks. Many of his publications are in biological journals. The discovery of some unique fossil embryos and separately the oldest fossil fish (in China) ever found (by some 50 million years!) further spread his notoriety. The radically earlier development of fish than was previously thought further documents the astounding evolution that took place in the Cambrian. As an outgrowth of the theoretical aspects of the evolution of animals, Conway Morris has even become involved in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI). He argues that organic evolution is strongly constrained so that from DNA to any organ, the same evolutionary sequence will occur anywhere in the universe that it is able to do so.
Simon Conway Morris was born on November 6, 1951. He attended the University of Bristol, England, where he earned a bachelor of science degree with honors in geology in 1972. He attended Cambridge University (Churchill College), England, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1975 as an advisee of Harry Whittington. Con-way Morris was appointed to a research fellowship at St. John’s College of Cambridge University from 1975 to 1979. He was appointed to lecturer and lecturer of paleontology positions in the Open University at Cambridge University from 1979 to 1991, at which point he became a reader in evolutionary paleobiology. He was also named a Fellow at St. John’s College in 1987. Since 1995, Conway Morris has been a professor of evolutionary paleobiology at Cambridge University. He was a Gallagher Visiting Scientist at the University of Calgary in 1981, a Merrill W. Haas Visiting Distinguished Professor at the University of Kansas in 1988, and a Selby Fellow at the Australian Academy of Sciences in 1992. Simon Conway Morris has been married to Zoe Helen James since 1975; they have two sons.
Simon Conway Morris is an author of more than 112 articles in international journals, professional volumes, and governmental reports. Many of these papers are cutting-edge studies that establish a new benchmark in metazoan evolution, the Cambrian-Precambrian boundary, and theoretical evolution. A number of these papers appear in high-profile journals like Science and Nature. He is also an author of some 100 book reviews, numerous topic entries, and the one book mentioned, in addition to editing five professional volumes. In recognition of his research contributions to paleontology and evolution, Conway Morris has received numerous honors and awards. He was awarded an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Uppsala in Sweden. He also received the Charles D. Walcott Medal from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Charles Schuchert Award from the Pa-leontological Society of the United States, the George Gaylord Simpson Prize from Yale University, and the Lyell Medal from the Geological Society of London.
Conway Morris has also performed significant service to the profession. He has served numerous functions for the Geological Society of London, the Royal Society (England), the U.K. National Environment Research Council, the International Trust for Zoological Nomenclature, and the Systematics Association among others.
