George Gaylord Simpson

“The question “What is man?” is probably the most profound that can be asked by man. It has always been central to any system of philosophy or theology…. The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely.”

“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.”

“I have a debt, a loyalty to the museum; the best place for me to do what I wanted to do.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Among the things most characteristic of organisms--most distinctive of living as opposed to inorganic systems--is a sort of directedness. Their structures and activities have an adaptedness, an evident and vital usefulness to the organism. Darwin's answer and ours is to accept the common sense view...[that] the end ("telos") [is] that the individual and the species may survive. But this end is (usually) unconscious and impersonal. Naive teleology is controverted not by ignoring the obvious existence of such ends but by providing a naturalistic, materialistic explanation of the adaptive characteristics serving them. [Book review in "Science," 1959, p. 673.]”

“Of course the orders all converge backward in time, to different degrees.”