George Gaylord Simpson

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George Gaylord Simpson

Foreign Member of the Royal Society[1]
Scientific career
FieldsPaleontology
InstitutionsColumbia University
Doctoral advisorRichard Swann Lull[1]

George Gaylord Simpson (June 16, 1902 – October 6, 1984) was an American

theory of plate tectonics
(and continental drift) when the evidence became conclusive.

He was Professor of

Geosciences at the University of Arizona
from 1968 until his retirement in 1982.

Awards and honors

Simpson was elected to the

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.[10]

At the

animal evolution
.

Views

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".[12]

He was raised as a Christian but in his early teens became an

agnostic, nontheist, and philosophical naturalist.[13]

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 (1978) (an autobiography)
  • Fossils and the History Of Life (1983)
  • Splendid Isolation (1980)
  • The Dechronization of Sam Magruder (posthumously published novella, 1996)

See also

References

  1. ^
    S2CID 31570609
    .
  2. ^ 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]
  3. doi:10.2475/ajs.238.6.413
    . p. 418.
  4. ^ 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.
  5. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved May 31, 2023.
  6. ^ "George G. Simpson". www.nasonline.org. Retrieved May 31, 2023.
  7. ^ "Mary Clark Thompson Medal". National Academy of Sciences. Archived from the original on December 29, 2010. Retrieved February 15, 2011.
  8. ^ "Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal". National Academy of Sciences. Archived from the original on August 1, 2012. Retrieved February 15, 2011.
  9. ^ "George Gaylord Simpson". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. February 9, 2023. Retrieved May 31, 2023.
  10. American Academy of Achievement
    .
  11. ^ Gould-Simpson Building, Univ. of Arizona Archived June 15, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
  12. PMID 16572129
    .
  13. 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.

Further reading

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to George Gaylord Simpson.
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