Simon Conway Morris has a new book out, Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe, which I suppose I’m going to have to read, simply because Conway Morris irritates me. I’ve so far only read a Nature review by Richard Lenski of it, but it’s a subject that interests me and I’ve read Conway Morris’s views on it before. I think he’s dead wrong. I suspect that this is a case where his amazing animus towards Stephen Jay Gould and his religious sensibilities have colored his opinion.

The core of the conflict is the question of whether any particular evolutionary outcome is inevitable, or whether it is shaped so much by accidents of history that no prediction is possible. Stephen Jay Gould was the best known proponent of the latter—his middle name really should have been “Contingency”—while Simon Conway Morris seems to have made the former the object of his crusade. It’s certainly likely that some properties of life are inevitable: the appearance of heterotrophs to take advantage of autotrophs, for instance, or the evolution of sensory organs sensitive to electromagnetic radiation over specific ranges prevalent on the planet, and of a wavelength that can be captured by a small sensor. Conway Morris wants to go further, though, and considers a specifically human-like form and intelligence to be as certain as the appearance of critters that eat other critters. This is a remarkable conclusion. When I look at the diversity and history of life on Earth, I see a paucity of forms that resemble us—we seem to be oddballs. Contrast us with aquatic forms, where you can clearly see that hydrodynamics commonly shapes organisms into that typical torpedo-shape, whether the organism is a fish or a reptile or a mammal, and it’s clear that our properties do not seem to be even a likely consequence of the history of our environments in comparison. And an environment that spawns a reiterated morphology for the vertebrate lineage doesn’t do the same for the arthropod or molluscan or annelid lineage.

So how does Conway Morris argue that humans are inevitable? Lenski summarizes:

Life’s Solution builds a forceful case for the predictability of evolutionary outcomes, not in terms of genetic details but rather their broad phenotypic manifestations. The case rests on a remarkable compilation of examples of convergent evolution, in which two or more lineages have independently evolved similar structures and functions. The examples range from the aerodynamics of hovering moths and hummingbirds to the use of silk by spiders and some insects to capture prey.


Convergence is widespread, despite the infinitude of genetic possibilities, because “the evolutionary routes are many, but the destinations are limited”, as Conway Morris puts it. Certain destinations are precluded by “the howling wildernesses of the maladaptive”, where the vast majority of genotypes are non-viable and prevent further exploration by natural selection. Conway Morris is spectacularly successful at tracking down and organizing examples of convergent evolution, but he admits that work to place convergences “into any sort of quantitative framework is still in its infancy”. In effect, he emphasizes the numerator (convergence) while skirting the denominator (all examples of evolution, both convergent and divergent).


Conway Morris is not content, however, to catalogue examples of convergent evolution. He wants to convince us that convergence implies the inevitability that some sentient human-like being will evolve on any life-bearing planet like Earth. Thus, he focuses his compilation on the attributes we associate with ourselves and the lineage that produced us. Fruiting bodies of slime moulds and myxobacteria show that multicellularity has evolved repeatedly. Warm-bloodedness evolved several times, as did live birth and even penile tumescence. Sensory organs exhibit numerous cases of convergence: the eyes have it, as seen in the camera-like eyes of vertebrates and octopuses, and the similar eyes of certain worms and jellyfish. So, too, mechanisms used by diverse organisms to smell, hear, echolocate, sense electrical fields and maintain balance are often convergent.

Whoa. Convergent evolution is the basis of his claim? That is simply ridiculous. Look at the eyes of squid and humans, and you see a superficial similarity: spherical structures derived from a cup-shaped patch of light sensitive tissue, capped with a transparent lens. Look deeper, though, and the differences leap out at you. For one example, our eyes collect all the photoreceptor output and channel it out one discrete bundle of nerves; our eyes are balls on stalks nested inside bony orbits, which can swivel about with a fair amount of freedom. Cephalopod eyes send their output back to the brain by way of multiple fine strands emanating from the back of the eye. They have eyes rooted to the head by a stringy forest of nerves, with concomitantly limited mobility. For every instance of convergent evolution, any examination will reveal deep, deep differences that are a consequence of the organisms’ history, not some immediate optimality dependent solely on an adaptive ideal. Convergence just doesn’t help him. It requires wilfully ignoring the important differences.

Simon Conway Morris is not a creationist. He’s a theistic evolutionist, who considers the entirely natural processes of evolution to be God’s way of creating life. He has said, “Evolution could be a process of God calling the universe towards a richer, more beautiful, more loving way of being.” Lenski also says,

The tension between inevitability and loneliness leads Conway Morris towards a higher objective, which is to re-establish “notions of awe and wonder” in evolution and thus “allow a conversation with religious sensibilities”.

Bleh. I really can’t argue against the possibility of a watchmaker god of this sort, but I also don’t think Conway Morris can reasonable argue for it, either. There is no evidence one way or another. It certainly isn’t solid ground on which to base a scientific account.

I think the real reason this book was written and that Conway Morris has taken this particular stance is because it directly opposes the position Stephen Jay Gould has taken. The antipathy Conway Morris has for Gould is practically legendary. Lenski notes it:

I am obliged, however, to caution readers about the deprecating way in which Conway Morris sometimes refers to evolutionists whose views he opposes. He is especially dismissive of Gould, who died a year ago: readers interested in their conflict can read an exchange elsewhere (Natural History 107, 48-55; 1998). Conway Morris’s antagonism to Gould becomes more puzzling when one reads--in a chapter titled “Towards a theology of evolution?"--of his disdain for “ultra-Darwinists” and “genetic fundamentalism”, as these were also frequent targets of Gould’s pen. But while Gould argued for the separation of science and religion, Conway Morris is searching for common ground.

Conway Morris’s earlier book, Crucible of Creation, oozes with spite against Gould. It’s remarkable because Gould had nothing but praise for Conway Morris in his (much more popular) book, Wonderful Life. I think there was an abiding resentment that Gould used his work, his data, his publications to come to a conclusion that he considers anathema, and that more people are familiar with the name Conway Morris through Gould’s writings than through his own (which may actually be a good thing for him: I think Conway Morris is a terrible writer, a real clinker, although I think his paleontology is great stuff).

Another author, Richard Fortey, has a nice summary of the Conway Morris-Gould wars in his book, Trilobite. He describes Conway Morris’s position and tactics:

Nearly ten years after Wonderful Life appeared, another book made an even more explosive sally into this arena. This time it was written by the star of the original Cambridge enfants terribles--and the hero of Gould’s Cambrian Weltanschauung--Simon Conway Morris. In the ten years or so since Steve Gould transcribed the significance of the Burgess Shale for the world (at least, his view of what was then understood in Cambridge), Simon had plentyof opportunity for second thoughts. His revised view now is apparently like that I sketched earlier: a rather defused “explosion.” Simon both accepted the need for an earlier history of animals and rightly pointed out the ways in which the Cambrian remained a distinctive period, when shells appeared, genuinely rapidly, alongside good fossil faunas of animals that lacked them. There was nothing very incindiary here. I would say that Simon had come around to seeing the Cambrian faunas in their context at a crucial phase in the genealogy of life. The explosions were reserved for Stephen J. Gould. I have never encountered such spleen in a book by a professional; I was taken aback. Gould doesn’t write, says the author, he produces “perorations.” He lacks originality, while laying claim to it. This little passage from The Crucible of Creation (1998) will give something of the flavor: “Again and again Gould has been seen to charge into battle...strangely immune to seemingly lethal lunges...Gould announces to awestruck onlookers that our present understanding of evolutionary processes is dangerously deficient...We look beyond the exponent of doom and there standing in the sunlight is the edifice of evolutionary theory, little changed.” This is a rather gassy way of saying that Gould is a mountebank.

Fortey has an explanation.

I could only diagnose the cause of Simon’s ire as being the very praise that Gould once heaped upon him. To return to Richard Dawkins’s story, this is like the young professor stamping hard on the foot of the older professor. Wonderful Life was such a global success. There, preserved in the aspic of a print that could never be unprinted, was the Conway Morris of “oh fuck! Not another new phylum!"--the Conway Morris of the early 1980s. The nineties version disowned the ideas of the earlier one, and quite right, too: scientists are supposed to move with the times. But what was lacking was any acknowledgment that the earlier version had existed at all. It was an extraordinary revision of history in favour of the present. So the root cause of Simon’s explosion was not envy of Gould, but resentment of the hold he had on the past. The casual reader of The Crucible of Creation, unaware of the history, would never gather that the author’s views had once been close to (if not actually shared with) Gould’s. Such a reader would never guess that Simon received the Schuchert Medal of the Paleontological Society of America, a signal honor, in 1991, and endorsed by Gould.

So, anyway, Conway Morris irritates me greatly. He’s a lousy writer. He holds views I strongly disagree with. He lets his religion guide his opinions in unscientific directions. He can be nasty and petty. Unfortunately, he’s also a paleontologist with direct access to the primary material, is extremely well-read and able to provide a wide perspective on the subjects he describes...so darn it, I’m going to have to read his latest book. And it’s probably going to irritate me even more.