Conway Morris Joins Past Laureates Freeman Dyson, the Dalai Lama, and Jane Goodall to Receive One of the World’s Largest Individual Lifetime Achievement Awards
Professor Simon Conway Morris, a groundbreaking paleontologist at the University of Cambridge, has been awarded the 2026 Templeton Prize for his outstanding contributions to the field of evolutionary biology and his enduring efforts to explore the broader human implications of his scientific discoveries.
Professor Conway Morris is internationally recognized for his pioneering research on the Cambrian explosion and his meticulous analysis of the Burgess Shale fauna. These studies have significantly reshaped our understanding of the early evolution of animal body plans and the dynamics of evolutionary innovation.
Conway Morris’s most distinctive contribution is the articulation and empirical substantiation of evolutionary convergence—the recurrence of similar biological forms and behaviors 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), he 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 renowned 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.
The Templeton Prize, valued at over $1.4 million, 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 honor those who harness the power of the sciences to explore the deepest questions of the universe and humankind’s place and purpose within it.
Simon Conway Morris reflected on the award in a statement for the Templeton Prize: “What a journey. As somebody once said—‘Be careful when you step onto the unending road.’ A Ph.D. 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 was born in 1951 in Carshalton (Surrey) and raised in Wimbledon. At about seven, his mother gave him an album of stamps depicting various pre-historic animals and dinosaurs. This prompted him to go fossil-hunting and inspired a lifelong fascination with the evolution of life.
He earned a B.Sc. with first-class honors from the University of Bristol in 1972 and a Ph.D. while at St. John’s College (where he remains a Fellow) in the University of Cambridge in 1976 under the tutelage of paleontologist Harry Blackmore Whittington. In 1990, at the age of 39, he was elected a fellow of the British Royal Society. He has remained at Cambridge for most of his career, from research fellow to reader, to the chair (as Professor of Evolutionary Paleobiology) of the Department of Earth Sciences, and now as an emeritus professor.
Conway Morris’s 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 criticized for purporting that natural processes are insufficient to produce biological complexity, requiring supernatural intervention. Instead, Conway Morris seeks to elucidate that the universe itself is biophilic, with fundamental natural laws bringing into being the life forms we see today.
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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 a keen interest in astrobiology—“The study of things that do not exist,” he likes to quip.
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 striking 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 tightly 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 video 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.”
In addition to his scholarship, 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.
His 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.
Conway Morris 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 scientists who have won the Prize include Nobel-winning physicist Frank Wilczek (2022), ethologist Jane Goodall (2021), cosmologist Martin Rees (2011), and physicist Freeman Dyson (2000).
From an original press release by the Templeton Foundation.
Feature image, credit Tim Cole / Templeton Prize