Time & Perspective Quote by Simon Conway Morris

The chill in Conway Morris's line comes from how it refuses the one consolation modernity keeps trying to buy: that history is a staircase. If atrocities were just the greasy residue of "barbarian" ancestors, then science and progress could be cast as solvent. He offers the bait of that comforting story ("a small crumb of comfort") and then snatches it away. The phrasing is almost liturgical in its disappointment: not only is there no clear prospect, there is "no such prospect" at all. He is staging the failure of a secular faith.

As a scientist, Conway Morris is also performing a boundary-setting move. He doesn't say science is useless; he says scientific analysis cannot "even remotely answer or account for" the worst things humans do. That double verb matters. "Answer" suggests moral justification or meaning; "account for" suggests causal explanation. By denying both, he’s pushing back against a certain kind of evolutionary or neurobiological swagger - the temptation to treat genocide, torture, or cruelty as just maladaptive leftovers, wiring glitches, or selection pressures. The subtext is a warning: when we explain evil too cleanly, we risk laundering it.

Contextually, this sits in late-20th/early-21st-century debates about reductionism, evolutionary psychology, and the hope that more data will tame the human animal. Conway Morris isn’t romanticizing mystery; he’s emphasizing consequence. If horror isn’t a developmental phase we outgrow, then vigilance isn’t pessimism. It's realism.