Editor’s Note: Simon Conway Morris, the 2026 Templeton Prize winner, is an evolutionary biologist from University of Cambridge. We interviewed him for the Templeton Ideas podcast to discuss his groundbreaking work and evolutionary insights.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Thomas Burnett: Simon, you’re best known for your work on the Burgess Shale. For those who are not familiar with it, can you tell us what it is and what you found there? 

Simon Conway Morris: The Burgess Shale is a layer of sediment exposed in the Canadian Rockies, I think 150 miles west of Calgary. It’s of Cambrian age, just over 500 million years old.

TB: What did you uncover there? Literally speaking? 

SCM: When I worked on the fossils, most of my material was based in Washington DC, so I spent a lot of time in the District. But the fossils themselves are extraordinary because if you go to any Cambrian outcrop, most likely you’ll find animals with their hard parts.

In the Burgess Shale it’s completely different. It is full of soft bodied creatures, which should not fossilize, but there they are staring at you. Fascinating. 

TB: You found evidence that five hundred million years ago, Earth had an incredible diversity of life. Is there an implicit inference that there is a great narrowing of diversity of life as time plotted on?

SCM: Not quite. If you go to Darwin’s Origin and go right to the end, he has a depiction of ever-greater diversity. And that indeed applies to the biosphere in the Cambrian—there were no whales, there were no palm trees, for instance. So from our perspective, there is much more now.

But from another perspective, at least at that time, it looked as if there was really a remarkable range of diversities which had not pulled through in the race for evolutionary success. And I ran with that. And indeed Stephen J. Gould, a very distinguished Harvard paleontologist, wrote a very laudatory book about our work, Wonderful Life. 

But subsequently, and I’ve done this several times in my career, which has not always pleased certain people, I’ve changed my mind. 

TB: Tell me a little bit more about that. What caused you to pivot?

SCM: Fortunately, most of the time I was not shouting into the mirror. In fact, a good deal of the work was the result of other people’s research, which showed that some of my conclusions were simply erroneous. And things, which I thought looked really strange, like one of the animals, which has unfortunately become a bit too famous, we called Hallucigenia because of its dreamlike appearance, actually turned out not to be quite as weird as I thought to begin with.

And this actually replicated itself across my studies on the Burgess Shale, which at that stage really looked pretty strange, have now been accommodated in known groups. That is what I should have realized at the beginning, but, you know, we were in a hurry and it was the first dip of the toe into the Cambrian ocean. 

Origin of Life

TB: I want to probe into deep time about the origin of life. A lot of organic molecules have been found on things like meteorites that have hit the Earth. There are organic materials seemingly throughout the universe, and from what I’ve read, some of the basic chemicals that comprise life themselves are fairly simple. Yet humans haven’t been able to create life from scratch, even if the ingredients are simple. Where are we stuck?

SCM: There is a whole set of plausible hypotheses, and my own hunch might be that if you want to find the origin of life, don’t stay on Earth—go to a comet, because these are organic-rich. We know that from the various probes which have visited them. Also, most of the time they are freezing cold, so chemical reactions hardly proceed. But when they come close to the sun, the chemical reactions really take off. All sorts of things happen, and then every now and again, part of a comet, or even a whole comet, will collide with a planet like Earth and deliver potential protolife, if not protocells or cells.

Now, that’s only one possibility. There’s a far more heretical suggestion, which I don’t myself subscribe to, but let us suppose for the sake of argument, that what we regard as a Big Bang is not quite what people think it is. I’m not an astronomer, but let us just suppose that life was always there, in which case we can push the answer back to infinity.

Now, I only mention that not because I think it’s correct. I think it’s most unlikely, but from the point of view of science, what one tries to do is imagine the unimaginable. In terms of the transition from abiogenesis to a functioning cell, I think all the practitioners freely admit that we do not have a satisfactory explanation, but it’s not a matter of defeat in the sense that we’ll never understand.

It simply means most likely, we’re looking in slightly the wrong place. 

Convergent Evolution

TB: I want to turn to a concept that you’ve articulated well in your books—convergent evolution. For those who are unfamiliar with it, could you briefly describe what convergent evolution is, and maybe some prominent examples of it?

SCM: Convergent evolution is in some ways, entirely unexceptional. It simply observes that from different starting points in the tree of life, although it’s a process of ever greater diversity, perhaps paradoxically, the end results as we see them today are strikingly similar. I could give you hundreds of examples.

My favorite example is that I am looking at the screen with a camera eye. If I was an octopus, I wouldn’t be sitting here at all, but I would still be using a camera eye. They’re almost identical. And the scientists would say, well, yes they are. And a very good reason for that because that’s the way the eye works.

There are all sorts of clever ways in which there are slight modifications, which allow one to get round what appears to be a potential problem.

TB: And there’s maybe many different ways to get to the same destination.

SCM: Oh yes. I mean, with the eyes, there’s something like 50 different sorts of eyes. So the so-called camera eye, which the human and the octopus have. But if you are an insect, you’ve got a compound eye. There’s lots and lots of lenses. That too has evolved a number of times independently.

It’s a good solution on its own scale, but certainly no good for a human. There is a quite famous calculation, which if the human had to have only a compound eye, it would have to have an eye at least a meter across, which would be rather awkward, wouldn’t it? 

TB: As I read your books, I found convergence around many different sensory organs. Vision as you’ve described, but also hearing, smelling, tasting, touch even maybe more exotic ones, echolocation, electromagnetic fields. Even in that space, do you see a lot of convergence? 

SCM: Oh, I think one does. In the grand scheme of things, I’m very hard pushed to find anything which isn’t actually convergent in one form or other.

And these would extend all the way from molecular biology through to things like anatomies all the way through to social systems. And part of that argument would then extend in some form or fashion to brains and intelligence. Those two in various ways are convergent. 

Convergence of Intelligence

TB: Given these convergent sensory abilities, what does that tell us about the convergence of something that’s a little bit more intangible, like the convergence of mind, the convergence of intellect across a range of creatures?

SCM: At one level, all life is intelligent.

All of it is making decisions, and it is based on alternatives which have to be adjudicated. And there are certainly lines of evidence from an interesting group called the slime molds; you can do experiments where you show that they have some sort of memory.

One has a tantalizing possibility that this is a very incipient stage of what we associate with our memory, and there must be some basis in that. I would suggest to the first approximation, we can look at the birds, crows, parrots, who have relatively large brains, and they do indeed seem to reflect this in their behaviors in one way or another.

Correspondingly amongst the vertebrates, especially the mammals: whales, elephants, the chimpanzee, the orangutan and gorilla. They indeed seem to show many of the aspects which we associate with human sentience.

But I perhaps mentioned earlier that I have a habit of changing my mind, and in this respect, I think I’ve moved on, but the degree of convergence is very striking, and one can use this to extrapolate this to perhaps the nature of extraterrestrials.

On the other hand, I’ve become increasingly interested, impressed, possibly even persuaded, by the uniqueness of humans, which have a series of features which we simply do not find in animals, most obviously language, most obviously technology. Where does all this come from? 

TB: Does that level of cognition, that level of intelligence and consciousness, does that depend on humans being primates?

Or maybe in principle, could another kind of mammal or another type of animal in other scenarios reach that point? 

SCM: With respect to convergent evolution, I think I’ve always tried to argue that I don’t really care what the group is at all. What I’m interested in are the major features resulting from evolution, which in that sense leads to a degree of predictability.

Now, it is the case that amongst the crows for example, which have relatively large brains, they’re pretty smart in all sorts of ways, and there’s little doubt there’s some connection with this larger brain. And the fascinating thing is that with the brain structure, it’s radically unlike that which we see in the primates.

Despite that, more or less the same sort of intelligence emerges. So that too seems to be a sort of a universal property.

Human Uniqueness

TB: So going back to that metaphor, there’s different ways to reach the same destination, even perhaps at the level of high intelligence. 

SCM: It seems to be the case, yes. But as I said, when we come to humans, we seem to have entered a completely new world. And I don’t find this particularly mysterious, but there’s a metaphysical argument here which has nothing much to do with Darwin.

TB: Some combination of over the last million years of biology and culture and this back and forth and feedback between cultural developments changing your biology, the biology then changes culture, and once you’ve got these certain ingredients, then this explosion of you’re not sure what’s gonna come next, but the possibilities are you’ve reached a new vista or almost a play space of possibilities. 

SCM: I think that’s very fair. I should add to that though, so far as we choose to define cultures in point of fact, you can identify cultures within chimpanzees. Chimpanzees have culture. But they may not know they have culture. This again seems to be the crucial difference.

There’s every reason to have cultural development. There may be a local environment which predisposes this group of chimpanzees to do termite fishing in this particular way. So that’s absolutely reasonable. But what we have now, of course, is a culture, which apart from anything else, allows us to step outside ourselves.

We are concerned with how we look to other people, and we love going to the theater, but an animal would think it’s ridiculous. I mean, why watch a lot of humans wandering around on a platform pretending to be other people? This is a waste of time, isn’t it? When we think the exact reverse.

The Search for Extra-terrestrial Life

TB: I want to revisit a topic you brought up earlier in terms of the search for life outside of our planet. It seems like you’ve given a lot of thought to the question of what’s described as Fermi’s Paradox. Could you describe what that paradox is, and then we can explore a bit of it together?

SCM: Enrico Fermi was a fantastically talented Italian physicist, and he fled Mussolini’s Italy with his wife who was Jewish. They came to the United States, and he was a linchpin in the development of atomic energy, and ultimately the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb. And later on in Los Alamos, around 1950, he’s sitting around with a lot of other people, all with brains the size of planets, incredibly clever people.

And he says as a throwaway line, “Where are they?” Well, probably what he was thinking about is how difficult interstellar travel is, but it has now morphed into the general sense: Where are they? Apparently—unless you have some news for me at the moment—there is no detection of extraterrestrials. No signals, no sign of visitation in the fossil record, which is not quite as daft as it sounds.

So what’s going on? 

TB: I find it fascinating, too. A two-pronged approach to searching for life. One might say, it’s very unlikely that there could be something highly intelligent. So our best bet is to be looking for microbes. Let’s look at the chemistry of the atmospheres on exoplanets and cross our fingers that there is some sort of biological signature. And then boom, we’ll have our evidence of life. 

And then there’s another prong that considers technology, as we’ve experienced it, is rapidly progressing. It’s going to be with ultra-advanced civilizations that there could be communication, and then boom, we’ve got evidence of life, but that’s an utterly different form of life.

What should we be looking for if we want to detect other forms of life? 

SCM: There are several possibilities—the most orthodox is simply to do what people are already doing. By investigating exoplanets, they are on the threshold of discovering the nature of their atmospheres. And that should indicate whether there is biology underneath.

But another possibility is to throw all the existing thinking out of the window and just think radically differently. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that what we are familiar with as abstract potentialities, which we associate with literature, with poetry, with music, with mathematics, are all in their different ways telling you something profound about the nature of the universe. 

Presuppose that the realities we associate with day-to-day existence are indeed important, but they are only a very small fraction of what is actually there. So let us suppose that through this advance one enters new dimensions of possibility and perhaps, just perhaps, that’s where we should be looking for the extraterrestrials.

But of course you will say, Simon, where’s the key? And I shall reply. Quite honestly, I haven’t got the foggiest idea. 

The Mystery of Consciousness

TB: So do I understand you correctly that it might be in the frontiers of consciousness and of thought where we might want to look for others, rather than looking at outer space?

SCM: Yes, I think that’s right. Convergence in terms of big brains and intelligence are, I think, an important part of this ingredient. But the nature of consciousness has very many different ways of being interpreted. To put it bluntly, I’m not a materialist of any sort at all.

I think most of my colleagues would say that consciousness is just there in the brain, but a number of people, including myself, think this is so unlikely as to not be worth discussing.

Most fascinating are the types of alternative states one finds in conscious humans. I could touch on many of them. One is the so-called placebo effect. Why is it that somehow the mind persuades itself that it’s going to be made healthy on the basis of the injection of distilled water? Something’s happening there. And then there are other things like multiple personalities where you have several personalities in the same person.

And one famous example: the person was very, very allergic, let say to peanuts, but the other personality had no allergy at all. This is in the same body. So what on earth is going on here? 

TB: I wonder if we’re in a period of time in which the openness to the kind of wider possibility space of what’s logical, not just what makes sense, if we’re kind of on the cusp of something.

I was talking to Christof Koch recently, whom I associate with someone who’s studying the neurological correlates of consciousness, but then I’ve heard him say recently that he’s much more open to a concept that ultimate reality might look more like idealism or panpsychism, where consciousness undergirds the physical space instead of sitting on top of it as a material byproduct.

And I just thought if somebody who works on brain science for 30 years thinks that ultimate reality might be Mind, maybe anything’s possible at this point. Do you see any shifting going on in the conversations that you’re having, in terms of what’s possible, of what’s real? 

SCM: I think it is perhaps a bit like the origin of life,

And I think this applies also to the study of consciousness. 

The Nature of Extra-terrestrial Life

TB: I want to come back to the topic of alien life and whether there’s life out there.

It’s a fascination, I think, both in the scientific community and in popular culture. And the question I have is what kind of inferences can we draw from the long, long history of life on earth and infer something about life out there? 

SCM: My estimate is that if we visit an Earth-like planet, and that’s a quite important note of care, it will be like the Earth. It will have forest, it will have oceans, it will have plants, therefore, and it’ll have marine creatures and they will often be streamlined because that’s the best way to do things if you want to be a shark or a whale or a tuna. And correspondingly on land, there will be many sorts of animals and they’d be chatting away to each other in one form or fashion.

But also they would be amongst this group of bipedal things which look astonishingly like humans. And all of this, of course, is predicated on the likelihood that convergence is indeed universal. Now, it could well be that in very extreme environments, perhaps very dense planets with lots of gravity available, then you have to change some of the rules.

But on the other hand, of course, perhaps this is just far too anthropomorphic. Perhaps my thinking is simply being channeled through terrestrial expectations, but given the physics of possibilities, given the chemistry of possibilities, given the way that bodies have to be made, I’m fairly confident that what we will find on these earth-like planets will be really pretty, pretty similar to what we have.

Not identical, heaven help us, that would be a big surprise, wouldn’t it? But even so, surprisingly similar. 

TB: I’m glad you brought this topic up and that specification of an Earth-like planet. So I imagine in some other highly intelligent space-traveling creatures, whether they came to our planet a billion years ago when there were no animals, or if they came right now, or if they came even a thousand years from now, which could be unimaginably different due to human technology from what we have now. If that’s almost like encountering three completely different realities, and they would draw three completely different conclusions.

What do we draw from these three different periods of Earth history and what that says about maybe life more generally? 

SCM: That’s a very fair summary. The problem is, if I may say with respect to the last alternative, we haven’t got the foggiest idea so we can think about it, but who knows. 

Were they to arrive today? One, imagine their technology such as it is, would be almost unimaginable. Arthur C. Clark makes this sort of point, but actually the first one is the most interesting, and this was something which I learned from a colleague, Charlie Lineweaver, who works in Australia, an American astronomer. And he and others have pointed out that many of the extra-solar systems, even in this galaxy, let alone elsewhere, have a headstart on our solar system of some billions of years.

So if all these things add together, let us say after three and a half billion years of evolution with a species which decides to go walkabout around the galaxy. Then we would’ve been visited, perhaps at the latest by the Cambrian. 

I made this point many times that they would see these little slippery things in the lagoon who look suspiciously like sardines. They say, well, let’s see what these are like. So out comes the barbecue kit and we, that is our ancestors, are there frying gently in the Cambrian sunlight. And that’s basically the end of us, I’m afraid to say, because one imagines then the whole history of planet Earth was radically derailed.

Or maybe they just come in and have a look around. But either way one would imagine that with this head start, then in one form or fashion, we really wouldn’t be here. But here we are.

The Human Condition

TB: I want to explore a philosophical question. Humans have done some extraordinary studies, investigations we can describe with mathematics, things that have happened billions of years ago. But one thing I think is so baffling is ourselves, the way we live, what we value, what we focus on day to day. Both the most spectacular things, whether aesthetics, ethics, athletics, you name it.

But we’re just so peculiar. If you compare us to any other creatures on this planet, what do you think of our universe from the fact that humans reside in it? In all of our diverse bizarre, wonderful and perplexing features. 

SCM: From one perspective, when I see an image called a deep field photograph taken by Hubble, or one of the more advanced telescopes, I do have a feeling of absolute vertigo. It’s just unimaginably large, and when they point out the size of the field relative to the size of the sky, they are all galaxies upon galaxies. 

On the other hand, so far as we know, we are the only species that has any comprehension of this, and finds it so interesting.

And that surely is the way to approach the question. It is our fascination and curiosity about the way these things are. I remember startlingly once, I was in Namibia, in the southern sky without light pollution. I was awestruck, just gobsmacked by the immense galaxies, the Magellanic clouds, and the Milky Way itself.

And it really was a symphony. Just, you know, hats off, break into applause. And that’s the way I look at it. The very fact it’s all beyond our reach in a certain sense, and the fact it’s all happened billions of years or millions of years ago, that light crawls across the galaxy, there’s neither here nor there.

TB: Blaise Pascal said something to that fact that I look at the vastness of the universe, and I’m this tiny little reed, and it is just so overwhelming. But then I realized, I’m a thinking reed, and my ability to engage with and imagine and reflect and explore that vastness is so cool. You’re flipping back and forth between insignificance to incredibly significant based on whether I’m thinking of myself as particles that are momentarily in this arrangement, versus thinking of myself as a thinking being that is trying to comprehend this vastness.

SCM: And there’s another riff on that from Olaf Stapleton’s Last and First Men. As I recall reading it as a teenager, it’s consciousness and intelligence which has a hand in controlling the way the universe evolves.

That too is a suggestion that in the way that we’re embedded in the universe, it’s not simply a mid-sized ape which gazes at the sky. There’s more to it than that. 

TB: Simon, thanks for taking time to talk to me today. We’ve covered the deep past of Earth as well as far out into the most unimaginable stretches of the universe, and it is fun to go on that journey with you.

SCM: Thank you ever so much.