G.+G.+Simpson+(2)



"Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind." (Simpson 345)

George Gaylord Simpson was born in Chicago, Illinois to Julia Kinney and Joseph Alexander Simpson on June 16, 1902. He was the youngest of three children, and he was brought up as a Presbyterian. He graduated from a Highschool in Denver, prior his families move, in 1918 and went on to attend the University of Colorado in Boulder. After being unsure of his major, he enrolled in a geology class and quickly found his passion in life. The geology class sparked Simpson to maintain a curiosity in life, to never stop asking questions and to be ambitious to find answers to his questions. Simpson transferred to Yale in his Senior year as advised to him based on the field he wanted to go into. Simpson was secretly married to Lydia Pedroja because Yale didn't allow its undergraduates to marry at the time, and produced four daughters in the first couple of years of marriage. He was a major part in the advances in theoretical evolution and taxonomy and cleared up questions involving the disagreements of Darwin's theory of natural selection. He worked as a paleontologist, disagreeing with how other paleontologists were thinking in his field at the time. They thought the path of evolution was clear and concise, that it happened without much gradual change over generations of species - where as Simpson thought differently. His mindset was that a species was more like a tree branch, changing and changing gradually until certain branches just died out. Simpson argued the evolution of mammals was seen in their fossils, and they fit perfectly with their new counterparts. He used a lot of uncommon mathematics to clarify his theory that evolution occurred in groups called "gene pools" rather than in individuals of a certain species. This also showed that if there were any gaps in fosillization that could not be explained, they could be rapid change. (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/06/2/l_062_02.html)

He made a name for himself through publications of books, his teachings, and his many other careers which included: "Undergraduate, University of Colorado, 1918-1919, 1920-1922 > Captain and later Major in the U.S. Army, 1942-1944  ( http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/~alroy/lefa/Simpson.html)  **Works Cited**  1930s, t. l. (n.d.). Introduction. UCSC Directory of individual web sites. Retrieved January 16, 2013, from http://people.ucsc.edu/~laporte/simpson/I Evolution: Library: George Gaylord Simpson: Natural Selection and the Fossil Record. (n.d.). PBS: Public Broadcasting Service. Retrieved January 18, 2013, from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library
 * Undergraduate, Yale University, 1922-1923 (B.A. 1923)
 * Ph.D. student, Yale University, 1923-1926
 * Post-doctoral researcher, British Museum (Natural History), 1926-1927
 * American Museum of Natural History, 1927-1959
 * Assistant curator, Department of Vertebrate Paleontology, 1927-1942
 * Curator, Department of Geology and Paleontology, 1945-1959
 * Professor of zoology, Columbia University, 1945-1959
 * Curator, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, 1959-1970
 * Professor, Department of Geosciences, University of Arizona, 1967-1984"
 * Professor, Department of Geosciences, University of Arizona, 1967-1984"

Lefalophodon: George Gaylord Simpson. (n.d.). Welcome to NCEAS | NCEAS. Retrieved January 18, 2013, from http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/~alroy/lefa/Simpson '