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
I don't know where to put whales. I'm sticking them here, but I don't have any reason for it.
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.
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.
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.
Almost all paleontologists recognize that the discovery of a complete transition is in any case unlikely.
I have a debt, a loyalty to the museum; the best place for me to do what I wanted to do.
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.
Splitting and gradual divergence of genera is exemplified very well and in a large variety of organisms.
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.
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.
Of course the orders all converge backward in time, to different degrees.
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.