"Man is the result of a purposeless and materialistic process that did not have him in mind. He was not planned"
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A chill settles over Simpson's sentence because it refuses the comfort of being yelled at. It's not a rant against religion, not even a triumphalist cheer for science; it's the flat, clinical tone of someone reporting a lab result. The rhetorical move is subtraction: take away intention, take away plan, and watch how quickly our favorite story about ourselves collapses.
Simpson was one of the architects of the Modern Synthesis in evolutionary biology, and you can hear that mid-century confidence in the phrasing. "Purposeless and materialistic" is doing double duty. It's descriptive (evolution works through variation, inheritance, selection, contingency) and corrective, aimed at a public still prone to smuggling teleology into nature. By saying the process "did not have him in mind", Simpson treats "mind" as a category error: nature doesn't draft blueprints. It iterates.
The subtext is a cultural intervention. Post-Darwin, many people tried to keep the human exceptionalism while conceding the mechanism: maybe evolution happened, but surely it was headed toward us. Simpson shuts that down. He also anticipates a common misunderstanding: that purposelessness equals meaninglessness. He doesn't say humans lack value; he says we lack preordination. The sting is ethical as much as metaphysical: if we weren't planned, there is no external alibi for what we do next. Agency doesn't arrive as a gift; it arrives as a responsibility we can't outsource.
Simpson was one of the architects of the Modern Synthesis in evolutionary biology, and you can hear that mid-century confidence in the phrasing. "Purposeless and materialistic" is doing double duty. It's descriptive (evolution works through variation, inheritance, selection, contingency) and corrective, aimed at a public still prone to smuggling teleology into nature. By saying the process "did not have him in mind", Simpson treats "mind" as a category error: nature doesn't draft blueprints. It iterates.
The subtext is a cultural intervention. Post-Darwin, many people tried to keep the human exceptionalism while conceding the mechanism: maybe evolution happened, but surely it was headed toward us. Simpson shuts that down. He also anticipates a common misunderstanding: that purposelessness equals meaninglessness. He doesn't say humans lack value; he says we lack preordination. The sting is ethical as much as metaphysical: if we weren't planned, there is no external alibi for what we do next. Agency doesn't arrive as a gift; it arrives as a responsibility we can't outsource.
Quote Details
| Topic | Meaning of Life |
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