Simon Conway Morris FRS (born 1951) is an English palaeontologist, evolutionary biologist, and astrobiologist known for his study of the fossils of the Burgess Shale and the Cambrian explosion.
[5] Conway Morris is based in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge and is best known for his work on the Cambrian explosion, the Burgess Shale fossil fauna and similar deposits in China and Greenland.
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.
[8] Conway Morris' views on the Burgess Shale are reported in numerous technical papers and more generally in The Crucible of Creation (Oxford University Press, 1998).
[12] He is a 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.
[9]In March 2009 he was the opening speaker at the Biological Evolution: Facts and Theories conference held at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, as well as chairing one of the sessions.