George Gaylord Simpson

George Gaylord Simpson
ForMemRS
Simpson in 1965
Born(1902-06-16)June 16, 1902
Chicago, Illinois
DiedOctober 6, 1984(1984-10-06) (aged 82)
Tucson, Arizona
Alma mater
Known forModern synthesis; quantum evolution
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsPaleontology
InstitutionsColumbia University
Doctoral advisorRichard Swann Lull[1]

George Gaylord Simpson (June 16, 1902 – October 6, 1984) was an American paleontologist.[2][3] Simpson was perhaps the most influential paleontologist of the twentieth century, and a major participant in the modern synthesis, contributing Tempo and Mode in Evolution (1944), The Meaning of Evolution (1949) and The Major Features of Evolution (1953). He was an expert on extinct mammals and their intercontinental migrations.[4] Simpson was extraordinarily knowledgeable about Mesozoic fossil mammals and fossil mammals of North and South America. He anticipated such concepts as punctuated equilibrium (in Tempo and Mode) and dispelled the myth that the evolution of the horse was a linear process culminating in the modern Equus caballus. He coined the word hypodigm in 1940, and published extensively on the taxonomy of fossil and extant mammals.[5] Simpson was influentially, and incorrectly, opposed to Alfred Wegener's theory of continental drift,[6] but accepted the theory of plate tectonics (and continental drift) when the evidence became conclusive.

He was Professor of Zoology at Columbia University, and Curator of the Department of Geology and Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History from 1945 to 1959. He was Curator of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University from 1959 to 1970, and a Professor of Geosciences at the University of Arizona from 1968 until his retirement in 1982.

Awards and honors

Simpson was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1936 and the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1941.[7][8] In 1943 Simpson was awarded the Mary Clark Thompson Medal from the National Academy of Sciences.[9] For his work, Tempo and mode in evolution, he was awarded the academy's Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal in 1944.[10] He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1948.[11] He was awarded the Linnean Society of London's prestigious Darwin-Wallace Medal in 1958. Simpson also received the Royal Society's Darwin Medal 'In recognition of his distinguished contributions to general evolutionary theory, based on a profound study of palaeontology, particularly of vertebrates,' in 1962. In 1966, Simpson received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.[12]

At the University of Arizona, Tucson, the Gould-Simpson Building was named in honor of Simpson and Minnesota geologist and polar explorer Lawrence M. Gould, who, like Simpson, also accepted an appointment as Professor of Geosciences at the University of Arizona after his formal retirement.[13] Simpson was noted for his work in the fields of paleobiogeography and animal evolution.

Views

In his 1944 magnum opus Tempo and Mode in Evolution, Simpson placed significant emphasis on quantum evolution as a major component explaining the morphological change seen in the fossil record, though by the time of writing his 1953 work The Major Features of Evolution, this emphasis had waned. The evolution of Simpson's view on quantum evolution was not due to influence from Theodosius Dobzhansky and Ernst Mayr, as argued by Stephen Jay Gould, but due to the evidence presented by palaeontologists such as Bryan Patterson and Thomas Westoll.[14]

Simpson was outspoken in his criticism of politically motivated pseudoscience and science denial, such as Lysenkoism and creationism. In his book Fossils and the History Of Life, Simpson wrote "The people of the Soviet Union learned the hard way that politicians cannot dictate how evolution works. The people of the United States need to know that politicians likewise cannot change the fact that evolution does indeed occur."[15]

In the 1960s, Simpson "rubbished the then-nascent science of exobiology, which concerned itself with life on places other than Earth, as a science without a subject".[16]

Simpson was raised as a Christian but in his early teens became an agnostic, nontheist, and philosophical naturalist.[17] By the time of his academic career, Simpson was a convinced atheist.[18]

Books

  • Attending marvels (1931)
  • Quantitative Zoology (1939)
  • Tempo and Mode in Evolution (1944)
  • The Principles of Classification and A Classification of Mammals (1945)
  • The Meaning of Evolution (1949, 1951)
  • Horses (1951)
  • Evolution and Geography (1953)
  • The Major Features of Evolution (1953)
  • Life: An Introduction to Biology (1957)
  • Quantitative Zoology (1960)
  • Principles of Animal Taxonomy (1961)
  • This View of Life (1964)
  • The Geography of Evolution (1965)
  • Penguins (1976)
  • Concession to the Improbable: An Unconventional Autobiography. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 1978. ISBN 978-0-300-02143-1 – via Internet Archive.
  • Splendid Isolation (1980)
  • The Book of Darwin (1983)
  • Fossils and the History Of Life (1983)
  • The Dechronization of Sam Magruder (posthumously published novella, 1996)

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c Whittington, H. B. (1986). "George Gaylord Simpson. 16 June 1902-6 October 1984". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 32: 525–39. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1986.0017. JSTOR 770122. PMID 11621258. S2CID 31570609.
  2. ^ International Palaeontological Union (I.P.U.) (1968). Westermann, G.E.G. (ed.). Directory of Palaeontologists of the World (excl. Soviet Union & continental China) (2 ed.). Hamilton, Ontario: McMaster University. p. 120. Retrieved July 2, 2025 – via Internet Archive.
  3. ^ McFadden, Robert D. (October 8, 1984). "GEORGE G. SIMPSON, 82, DIES; A VERTEBRATE PALEONTOLOGIST". The New York Times. Retrieved July 2, 2025.
  4. ^ Simpson G.G. 1940. Mammals and land bridges. Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences 30: 137–163. See Charles H. Smith's website for full text: [1]
  5. ^ Simpson, G. G. (1940). "Types in modern taxonomy". American Journal of Science. 238 (6): 413–426. Bibcode:1940AmJS..238..413S. doi:10.2475/ajs.238.6.413. p. 418.
  6. ^ Simpson G.G. 1953. Evolution and geography: an essay on historical biogeography with special reference to mammals. Oregon State System of Higher Education: Eugene, Oregon.
  7. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved May 31, 2023.
  8. ^ "George G. Simpson". www.nasonline.org. Retrieved May 31, 2023.
  9. ^ "Mary Clark Thompson Medal". National Academy of Sciences. Archived from the original on December 29, 2010. Retrieved February 15, 2011.
  10. ^ "Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal". National Academy of Sciences. Archived from the original on August 1, 2012. Retrieved February 15, 2011.
  11. ^ "George Gaylord Simpson". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. February 9, 2023. Retrieved May 31, 2023.
  12. ^ "Golden Plate Awardees of the American Academy of Achievement". www.achievement.org. American Academy of Achievement.
  13. ^ Gould-Simpson Building, Univ. of Arizona Archived June 15, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
  14. ^ Payne, Harrison (August 2025). "G.G. Simpson's changing attitude towards quantum evolution". Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. 112: 60–69. doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2025.06.007. Retrieved January 31, 2026 – via Elsevier Science Direct.
  15. ^ Simpson, George Gaylord (June 1, 1983). Fossils and the History of Life. Scientific American Books. p. 205. ISBN 978-0716715641.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
  16. ^ Anon (2006). "Astrobiology at ten". Nature. 440 (7084): 582. Bibcode:2006Natur.440Q.582.. doi:10.1038/440582a. PMID 16572129.
  17. ^ Léo F. Laporte, ed. (1987). Simple Curiosity: Letters from Gaylord Simpson to His Family, 1921-1970. University of California Press. p. 16. ISBN 9780520057920. By his early teens, Simpson had given up being a Christian, although he had not formally declared himself an atheist. At college he began the gradual development of what might best be called positivistic agnosticism: a belief that the world could be known and explained by ordinary empirical observation without recourse to supernatural forces. Ultimate causation, he considered unknowable.
  18. ^ Nyhart, Lynn K.; Lidgard, Scott (August 20, 2021). "Revisiting George Gaylord Simpson's "The Role of the Individual in Evolution" (1941)". Biological Theory. 16 (4): 203–212. doi:10.1007/s13752-021-00386-7. ISSN 1555-5542. Retrieved December 24, 2025 – via Springer Nature Link.

Further reading

allikas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_G._Simpson