Pursuing praxis

I’m reading biographies of George Gaylord Simpson - his autobiography, Concession to the Improbable: An unconventional autobiography, and Leo LaPorte’s George Gaylord Simpson: Evolutionist and Paleontologist. I don’t know whether I stopped reading La Porte’s book because I wanted to read Simpson in his own words first, or if I just happened to order and receive Simpson’s autobiography ’round about that time.

To cut to the chase - I have no pithy summations, crusading opining or otherwise synthesized thought on the subject yet. I find Simpson fascinating and extremely rewarding to read and read about. In the various mentions of Simpson that I had come across in my previous readings, he was frequently described as irascible, though brilliant, and left at that. I read tonight that Simpson far preferred the written word - on both the giving and receiving ends - to the spoken word, given or received. There is the occasional tetchiness, but it is a tiny minority of the time. That said, I find it funnier when the anecdote is crabby, so there is a selection bias in the quotes copied below. Enjoy.

I was reminded of my short vacation in Egypt, and the few days in Cairo. While I saw less wildlife in the streets than described by Simpson on his (first) round-the-world trip in 1951, I think it’s only apt to cite that long-used, much-discussed maxim (which dates to at least Aristotle’s time): natura non facit saltus [nature makes no leaps]. My experience of streets in Cairo was similar in the feeling, if not in all the particulars. He wrote (pg. 149):

The streets of Cairo are dirty, noisy, and dangerous. As I wrote at the time, "The streets and roads are jammed with pedestrians, camels, donkeys, water buffaloes [Argh! I’m 50 years too late.], bullock-carts and horse-carts, jeeps, Coca Cola trucks, baby carriages, bicycles and motorcycles, crawling infants, dogs, cats, and in short everything imaginable that can move or be dragged with the possible exception of reindeer sledges, and it would not really surprise me to see one of those. There seems to be a slight statistical probability that cars will pass to the right if this is convenient, but otherwise no traffic rules seem to be applied."

For some reason, the following quote (at the very end) is my favorite so far (pg. 157):

It [Life of the Past, a "fairly short and not unduly technical book on general paleontology"] had some good reviews, and one bad one by a British zoologist who objected violently to the illustrations, which I had drawn myself during that winter at [his seasonal home in] Los Pinavetes [New Mexico]. I admit that my drawings are crude and inartistic, but they have a certain amateur freedom that some people find attractive or at least amusing. What did annoy me a bit was that my critic had also illustrated some of his publications and that his drawings were just as crude and inartistic as mine, and moreover that he had the poor taste to die before I could point that out to him. 

Simpson made several expeditions to South America over several decades. At the start of his last field expedition there, the woman in charge of the guesthouse where he and his team stayed for some time went to some length to counter the stereotypes about the town, Cruzeiro do Sul, "effectively the last outpost of civilization in that direction [in Brazil]" (pg. 166). About her he wrote (pg. 167):

A nice woman, talkative and a booster for her home town: "Those people down in Manaus think we are savages up here, nothing but forest and jaguars. Why! Jaguars rarely come into town. This is the healthiest place in Brazil. Almost no tuberculosis and only a few dozen lepers. The malaria is not bad this year. This is real white man’s country. It takes a little planning to get food, is all."

For those of you who don’t know, Simpson spent most of his life married to Anne Roe, a psychologist and for a time also a professor at Harvard (both Simpson and Roe joined Harvard at the same time, and left at the same time, as far as I know). They co-authored a couple of books together, both very good: Quantitative Zoology (1939) and Behavior and Evolution (1958). Simpson recounts the origin of the latter book, and indeed the field of study it spawned (pg. 177):

Another book in the 1950s resulted from a different and delightfully intimate form of collaboration. The idea came to Anne and me sometime in 1953. We remember the incident clearly but are not sure of the date. It was probably a Sunday because she and I were lying late in bed one morning talking about the universe and other things. Psychology is in the main a study of behavior, but up to that time most psychologists took observed behavior as given and paid little or no attention to the fact that it must have originated at some time in the evolutionary history of the species being studied, then usually rats and humans. Such evolutionary concepts as were currently in psychology struck me as generally naive, outdated, or simply wrong. On the other hand, evolutionists were studying mostly morphology, genetics, or to some extent ecology. Some of them did recognize that behavior is also relevant to evolution, but their concepts of behavioral studies in psychology struck Anne as generally naive, outdated, or simply wrong. We decided to something about this, got out of bed, and set about doing so.

[. . .]

That was a seminal work. It strongly influenced the direction of studies both of behavior and of evolution, as attested not only by those who had attended the conferences [organized to promote these kinds of studies] but also many of their colleagues and students. . . .  

The lesson of all this is that an effective method for getting really interdisciplinary studies under way is for students of different disciplines to wake up in bed together.

I will stop here with the quotes tonight. As you can see, I can’t even copy other people’s words briefly.