Deep Quote by George G. Simpson

Simpson writes like a man trying to puncture a balloon without spilling the champagne. The sentence starts with the coldest possible vocabulary - “a state of matter” - then methodically walks “he” down the ladder: matter to life to animal to primate. It’s a deliberate demotion of human exceptionalism, but it’s not misanthropic. It’s an insistence that the most radical thing you can say about humans is also the most ordinary: we belong.

The intent is scientific clarity with rhetorical bite. By stacking categories in a single breath, Simpson mimics taxonomy itself: nested boxes, each one shrinking the space for mysticism. The phrasing “akin nearly or remotely” is doing quiet work. It grants degrees of kinship without surrendering the core claim of continuity, letting the reader keep their intuitive sense of difference while refusing the comforting fantasy of separation.

Subtext: if humans are “a species of the Order Primates,” then human behavior is not exempt from the pressures that shape other animals - evolution, environment, contingency. That has consequences. It undercuts political and religious narratives that treat “Man” as a special substance with special rules. It also rebukes a certain kind of moral self-congratulation: you don’t get to declare yourself outside nature while exploiting it.

Contextually, this is mid-20th-century evolutionary science pushing back against residual vitalism and the softer, human-centered rhetoric that often clings to anthropology. Simpson, a key architect of the modern evolutionary synthesis, isn’t just defining humanity; he’s re-situating it, making “he” sound less like a crown and more like a coordinate on the map of matter.