Photo: Professor Simon 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.

Former CPS President (2018-2020) 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.

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.”

Professor Simon Conway Morris is the second CPS Fellow to be awarded the Templeton Prize. Martin J. Rees, Astronomer Royal, former Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and former president of the Royal Society was awarded the Prize in 2011.

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.

Adapted from a media release by the Templeton Prize.