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[Darwin] gave an answer to the tremendous question that so deeply concerns…What is Man? [He] answered this question to the effect that man is a natural product of the universe;…man is an animal, a vertebrate, a mammal, and a primate….By bringing man into the evolutionary picture, Darwin finally took the last step in our emancipation and finally made our world rational. [Yet] Darwin felt humility and awe that seem to me truly religious. [“Darwin led us into this modern world,” 1959, p. 271-272.]

George Gaylord Simpson

[Darwin] gave an answer to the tremendous question that so deeply concerns…What is Man? [He] answered this question to the effect that man is a natural product of the universe;…man is an animal, a vertebrate, a mammal, and a primate….By bringing man into the evolutionary picture, Darwin finally took the last step in our emancipation and finally made our world rational. [Yet] Darwin felt humility and awe that seem to me truly religious. [“Darwin led us into this modern world,” 1959, p. 271-272.]

George Gaylord Simpson
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The conflict between science and religion has a single and simple cause. It is the designation as religiously canonical of any conception of the material world open to scientific investigation....As a matter of fact, most of the dogmatic religions have exhibited a perverse talent for taking the wrong side on the most important concepts of the material universe, from the structure of the solar system to the origin of man. The result has been constant turmoil for many centuries, and the turmoil will continue as long as religious canons prejudge scientific questions.
George Gaylord Simpson
From horses we may learn not only about the horse itself but also about animals in general, indeed about ourselves and about life as a whole.
George Gaylord Simpson
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.
George Gaylord Simpson
Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.
George Gaylord Simpson
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.]
George Gaylord Simpson
I don't think that evolution is supremely important because it is my specialty; it is my specialty because I think it is supremely important. [In: Edward J. Larson (2004) Evolution, Modern Library. p. 250]
George Gaylord Simpson
The greatest impact of the Darwinian revolution...was that it completed the liberation from superstition and fear that began in the physical sciences a few centuries before. Man, too, is a natural phenomenon. [in "The evolutionary concept of man", 1972, p. 35.]
George Gaylord Simpson
Man has risen, not fallen. He can choose to develop his capacities as the highest animal and to try to rise still farther, or he can choose otherwise. The choice is his responsibility, and his alone. There is no automatism that will carry him upward without choice or effort and there is no trend solely in the right direction. Evolution has no purpose; man must supply this for himself. The means to gaining right ends involve both organic evolution and human evolution, but human choice as to what are the right ends must be based on human evolution.
George Gaylord Simpson
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