Top 28 George Gaylord Simpson Quotes
#2. If a sect does officially insist that its structure of belief demands that evolution be false, then no compromise is possible. An honest and competent biology teacher can only conclude that the sect's beliefs are wrong and that its religion is a false one.
George Gaylord Simpson
#3. 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.
George Gaylord Simpson
#4. Certainly paleontologists have found samples of an extremely small fraction, only, of the earth's extinct species, and even for groups that are most readily preserved and found as fossils they can never expect to find more than a fraction.
George Gaylord Simpson
#5. Every paleontologist knows that most new species, genera, and families, and that nearly all categories above the level of family appear in the record suddenly and are not led up to by known, gradual, completely continuous transitional sequences.
George Gaylord Simpson
#6. The greatest impact of the Darwinian revolution...was that it completed the liberation from superstition and fear that began in the physical sciences a few centuries before. Man, too, is a natural phenomenon. [in "The evolutionary concept of man", 1972, p. 35.]
George Gaylord Simpson
#7. Recognition of this kinship with the rest of the universe is necessary for understanding him, but his essential nature is defined by qualities found nowhere else, not by those he has in common with apes, fishes, trees, fire, or anything other than himself.
George Gaylord Simpson
#8. Almost all paleontologists recognize that the discovery of a complete transition is in any case unlikely.
George Gaylord Simpson
#9. A rill in a barnyard and the Grand Canyon represent, in the main, stages of valley erosion that began some millions of years apart.
George Gaylord Simpson
#10. 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.
George Gaylord Simpson
#11. The argument from absence of transitional types boils down to the striking fact that such types are always lacking unless they have been found.
George Gaylord Simpson
#12. To put it crudely but graphically, the monkey who did not have a realistic perception of the tree branch he jumped for was soon a dead monkey-and therefore did not become one of our ancestors.
George Gaylord Simpson
#13. Human judgment is notoriously fallible and perhaps seldom more so than in facile decisions that a character has no adaptive significance because we do not know the use of it.
George Gaylord Simpson
#14. Man is the result of a purposeless and materialistic process that did not have him in mind. He was not planned.
George Gaylord Simpson
#15. From horses we may learn not only about the horse itself but also about animals in general, indeed about ourselves and about life as a whole.
George Gaylord Simpson
#16. Darwin recognized the fact that paleontology then seemed to provide evidence against rather for evolution in general or the gradual origin of taxonomic categories in particular.
George Gaylord Simpson
#18. I don't think that evolution is supremely important because it is my specialty; it is my specialty because I think it is supremely important. [In: Edward J. Larson (2004) Evolution, Modern Library. p. 250]
George Gaylord Simpson
#20. I don't know where to put whales. I'm sticking them here, but I don't have any reason for it.
George Gaylord Simpson
#21. 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.
George Gaylord Simpson
#22. 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.
George Gaylord Simpson
#23. Splitting and gradual divergence of genera is exemplified very well and in a large variety of organisms.
George Gaylord Simpson
#24. 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.
George Gaylord Simpson
#25. The fact - not theory - that evolution has occurred and the Darwinian theory as to how it occurred have become so confused in popular opinion that the distinction must be stressed.
George Gaylord Simpson
#26. I have a debt, a loyalty to the museum; the best place for me to do what I wanted to do.
George Gaylord Simpson
#28. 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.
George Gaylord Simpson
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