George Gaylord Simpson
George Gaylord Simpson
George Gaylord Simpsonwas an American paleontologist. Simpson was perhaps the most influential paleontologist of the twentieth century, and a major participant in the modern evolutionary synthesis, contributing Tempo and mode in evolution, The meaning of evolutionand The major features of evolution. He was an expert on extinct mammals and their intercontinental migrations. He anticipated such concepts as punctuated equilibriumand dispelled the myth that the evolution of the horse was a linear process culminating in the modern Equus caballus. He coined...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth16 June 1902
CountryUnited States of America
Splitting and gradual divergence of genera is exemplified very well and in a large variety of organisms.
Most of the dogmatic religions have exhibited a perverse talent for taking the wrong side on the most important concepts in the material universe, from the structure of the solar system to the origin of man.
It is now firmly established that ontogeny does not repeat phylogeny
Species evolve exactly as if they were adapting as best they could to a changing world, and not at all as if they were moving toward a set goal.
...the argument from absence of transitional types boils down to the striking fact that such types are always lacking unless they have been found.
It is obvious that the great majority of humans throughout history have had grossly, even ridiculously, unrealistic concepts of the world. Man is, among many other things, the mistaken animal, the foolish animal. Other species doubtless have much more limited ideas about the world, but what ideas they do have are much less likely to be wrong and are never foolish. White cats do not denigrate black, and dogs do not ask Baal, Jehovah, or other Semitic gods to perform miracles for them.
It remains true, as every paleontologist knows, that most new species, genera, and families, and that nearly all categories above the level of families, appear in the record suddenly and are not led up to by known, gradual completely continuous transitional sequences.
The meaning that we are seeking in evolution is its meaning to us, to man. The ethics of evolution must be human ethics. It is one of the many unique qualities of man, the new sort of animal, that he is the only ethical animal. The ethical need and its fulfillment are also products of evolution, but they have been produced in man alone.
The earliest and most primitive known members of every order already have the basic ordinal characters, and in no case is an approximately continuous sequence from one order to another known. In most cases the break is so sharp and the gap so large that the origin of the order is speculative and much disputed.
The science of systematics has long been affected by profound philosophical preconceptions, which have been all the more influential for being usually covert, even subconscious.
The search for historical laws is, I maintain, mistaken in principle.
It is inherent in any definition of science that statements that cannot be checked by observation are not really saying anything or at least they are not science.
The opposition to teaching evolution is, of course, almost always given a religious reason. That may usually be its real basis, but I think it is often a mask, perhaps unconscious, for underlying anti-intellectualism or antiscientism.
Man is the result of a purposeless and materialistic process that did not have him in mind. He was not planned. He is a state of matter, a form of life, a sort of animal, and a species of the Order Primates, akin nearly or remotely to all of life and indeed to all that is material.