George Gaylord Simpson Quotes

26 Sourced Quotes

The guanaco is a camel but He hasn't got a hump. He's about three-quarters mountain goat And seven-eighths a chump.

George Gaylord Simpson
Evolution has no purpose; man must supply this for himself.

George Gaylord Simpson
To those who follow that science, nothing is more lively than the study of the dead remains of ancient life. Fascinating in itself, paleontology also impinges on much else that is interesting, important, and useful.

George Gaylord Simpson
The history of life ceases to be hypothesis and inference and becomes direct knowledge when fossils are available.

George Gaylord Simpson
Biology starts with biochemistry and goes on to neurophysiology and genetics. All else is stamp-collecting.

George Gaylord Simpson
Experimental biology... may reveal what happens to a hundred rats in the course of ten years under fixed and simple conditions, but not what happened to a billion rats in the course of ten million years under the fluctuating conditions of earth history. Obviously, the latter problem is more important.

George Gaylord Simpson
It is inherent in any acceptable definition of science that statements that cannot be checked by observation are not really about anything or at the very least, they are not science.

George Gaylord Simpson
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
Taxonomy is a science, but its application to classification involves a great deal of human contrivance and ingenuity, in short, of art. In this art there is leeway for personal taste, even foibles, but there are also canons that help to make some classifications better, more meaningful, more useful than others.

George Gaylord Simpson
When bright young biologists speak of genetics without genes and wise old biologists of life without organisms it is evident that something peculiar is going on in the science of biology, so peculiar that "crisis" is not too strong a word. I would diagnose this as combining monomania and schizophrenia.

George Gaylord Simpson
As for the scope of science, it includes everything known to exist or to happen in the material universe. Since the arts, philosophy, and theology do exist in the material universe, they too are within the scope of science and can properly be studied as psychological, anthropological, and biological phenomena.

George Gaylord Simpson
For almost every topic discussed in the following pages the data are insufficient.

George Gaylord Simpson
Systematics is the scientific study of the kinds and diversity of organisms and of any and all relationships among them.

George Gaylord Simpson
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
Biology, then, is the science that stands at the centre of all science. It is the science most directly aimed at science's major goal and most definitive of that goal. And it is here, in the field where all the principles of all the sciences are embodied, that science can truly become unified.

George Gaylord Simpson
Man stands alone in the universe, a unique product of a long, unconscious, impersonal, material process with unique understanding and potentialities. These he owes to no one but himself, and it is to himself that he is responsible. He is not the creature of uncontrollable and undeterminable forces, but is his own master. He can and must decide and manage his own destiny.

George Gaylord Simpson
It is now firmly established that ontogeny does not repeat phylogeny

George Gaylord Simpson
The basic problems of evolution are so broad that they cannot hopefully be attacked from the point of view of a single scientific discipline.

George Gaylord Simpson
Exobiology - a curious development in view of the fact that this "science" has yet to demonstrate that its subject matter exists!

George Gaylord Simpson
It is another aphorism that no ones knows everything about anything. That need not dull the pleasure and fascination of the fact that a great deal is known about some things.

George Gaylord Simpson
Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.

George Gaylord Simpson
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
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
The search for historical laws is, I maintain, mistaken in principle.

George Gaylord Simpson
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.

George Gaylord Simpson
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