George Gaylord Simpson Quotes.
The search for historical laws is, I maintain, mistaken in principle.
It is now firmly established that ontogeny does not repeat phylogeny
I have a debt, a loyalty to the museum; the best place for me to do what I wanted to do.
Splitting and gradual divergence of genera is exemplified very well and in a large variety of organisms.
A rill in a barnyard and the Grand Canyon represent, in the main, stages of valley erosion that began some millions of years apart.
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.
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.
Almost all paleontologists recognize that the discovery of a complete transition is in any case unlikely.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t know where to put whales. I’m sticking them here, but I don’t have any reason for it.
…the argument from absence of transitional types boils down to the striking fact that such types are always lacking unless they have been found.
It remains true, as every paleontologist knows, that most new species, genera, and families, and that nearly all categories above the level of families, appear in the record suddenly and are not led up to by known, gradual completely continuous transitional sequences.
The earliest and most primitive known members of every order already have the basic ordinal characters, and in no case is an approximately continuous sequence from one order to another known. In most cases the break is so sharp and the gap so large that the origin of the order is speculative and much disputed.
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.
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.
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.
Now we do have many examples of transitional sequences.
