Science Quote by Simon Conway Morris

Conway Morris is doing something that scientists rarely get credit for: drawing a hard boundary and then deliberately leaning over it. The opening is blunt, almost defensive in its repetition - "true", "it happens", "the way the world is" - as if he is anticipating the tired culture-war move where evolution is treated as a belief system to be accepted or rejected. He plants the flag: evolution is descriptive fact, not a philosophical preference, and humans are not exempt.

Then comes the pivot that gives the quote its charge. By insisting that evolution can carry "metaphysical implications", he refuses the common trade: accept Darwin, abandon meaning. The subtext is aimed at two audiences at once. To religious skeptics of evolution, he's saying: stop arguing with the data; it isn't going away. To strict materialists, he's saying: don't smuggle your own metaphysics in under the label of "science" and pretend it's neutral.

Context matters because Conway Morris has long been associated with the idea of convergent evolution - that similar solutions repeatedly arise, suggesting constraints and, to some, a kind of directionality. So when he says he's "convinced" about metaphysical implications, he's not offering a lab result; he's framing an interpretive stance that rides on patterns he thinks nature keeps revealing. The rhetorical strategy is careful: evolution stays intact, but the existential story we tell about it remains contested, and he wants a seat at that table without surrendering scientific credibility.