Quote: Simpson on geneticists and paleontologists
From the introduction of G. G. Simpson, 1943, Tempo and Mode in Evolution, p. xv:
The attempted synthesis of paleontology and genetics, an essential part of the present study, may be particularly surprising and possibly hazardous. Not long ago paleontologists felt that a geneticist was a person who shut himself in a room, pulled down the shades, watched small flies disporting themselves in milk bottles, and thought that he was studying nature. A pursuit so removed from the realities of life, they said, had no significance for the true biologist. On the other hand, the geneticists said that paleontology had no further contributions to make to biology, that its only point had been the completed demonstration of the truth of evolution, and that it was a subject too purely descriptive to merit the name "science." The paleontologist, they believed, is like a man who undertakes to study the principles of the internal combustion engine by standing on a street corner and watching the motor cars whiz by.
Now paleontologists and geneticists are learning tolerance for each other, if not understanding. As a paleontologist, I confess to inadequate knowledge of genetics, and I have not met a geneticist who has demonstrated much grasp of my subject; but at least we have come to realize that we do have problems in common and to hope that difficulties encountered in each separate type of research may be resolved or alleviated by the discoveries of the other.
