George Gaylord Simpson
1902-1984
American Paleontologist
A pioneer in the application of statistical methods to paleontology, George Simpson added immensely to scientific knowledge concerning prehistoric life. In the course of a long career that took him to varied destinations around the globe, he analyzed fossil remains, and from these derived information about migratory patterns, evolutionary histories, and other facts of the distant past. He was also a prolific writer who produced several important texts.
The youngest of three children, Simpson was born in Chicago on June 16, 1902, to Joseph and Helen Kinney Simpson. When Simpson was a baby, his father, a lawyer, took a job as a railroad claims adjuster in Denver, Colorado; later he became a land speculator. Simpson credited his father for taking him on many hikes and camping trips, which engendered in him a love of the outdoors that would aid him throughout his career.
A brilliant student, Simpson finished high school several years early, and in 1918 entered the University of Colorado. Later, a professor convinced him to make the transition to Yale, from which he graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1923. Also in 1923, he married Lydia Pedroja, with whom he had four daughters.
George Gaylord Simpson. (Library of Congress. Reproduced with permission.)In 1926 Simpson earned his doctorate at Yale. His dissertation concerned fossils in the Peabody Museum collection dating from the Mesozoic era, a period that marked the first appearance of mammals. Later, he received a fellowship to study Mesozoic mammals at the British Museum in London. By 1927 he was back in the United States, where he took a position as assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Simpson would remain at the museum for more than three decades, during which time he conducted his most important research. He eventually became curator of fossil mammals and birds, as well as chairman of the department of geology and paleontology, and, from 1945 to 1959, he taught at Columbia University.
In April 1938 Simpson and Lydia divorced, and a month later he remarried to Anne Roe, a psychologist with whom he had been friends since childhood. With Roe's knowledge of statistics and Simpson's expertise in paleontology and zoology, the two collaborated on a number of projects, including the textbook Quantitative Zoology, published in 1939. Simpson followed this in 1944 with Tempo and Mode in Evolution, his most important work, in which he demonstrated that fossil findings could be quantified. Furthermore, he showed that the fossil record could beshown to align with emerging knowledge at the nexus of population genetics and natural history.
From 1942 to 1944 Simpson served in World War II as an army officer, with tours of duty in North Africa and Italy. After he returned to the United States, he conducted extensive fieldwork in New Mexico and Colorado, searching for mammal fossils from the Eocene (54 million years ago) and Paleocene (65 million years ago) eras. Most prominent among his finds were 15 inch (38.1 cm) high creatures he named Dawn Horses. In 1949 he published The Meaning of Evolution, a text that presented the complexities of evolutionary theory in easy-to-understand language.
Misfortune struck Simpson while conducting fieldwork in Brazil in 1956. A tree felled by an assistant clearing a campsite fell on him, leaving him with a concussion and such severe injuries that he could not walk for two years. He was forced to resign his position at the American Museum, but in the quarter-century that followed he traveled and wrote extensively. Among his most significant expeditions was a 1961 trip to Kenya with Louis Leakey (1903-1972), during which Leakey discovered a highly significant skull fragment. The fragment was subsequently linked with Ramapithecus, believed to have been a human ancestor from 14 million years ago.
In 1967 Simpson and his wife move to Tucson, Arizona, where he took a position with the University of Arizona. The couple also established the Simroe Foundation, a nonprofit agency intended to disseminate the knowledge they had gathered. He received a number of awards and belonged to several professional associations. In 1982 Simpson retired, and, on October 6, 1984, he died of pneumonia at a hospital in Tucson.
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