Science Quote by George G. Simpson

“Of course” is doing a lot of work here: it’s a small flare of confidence meant to preempt debate. George Gaylord Simpson, one of the architects of the modern evolutionary synthesis, isn’t offering a poetic aside. He’s laying down a methodological rule for how to read life’s diversity without smuggling in a ladder of progress.

“Orders” points to taxonomy at a high rank, the kind of classificatory boxes that can feel permanent in textbooks. Simpson’s move is to remind you those boxes are historical products. If you trace any two “orders” back through evolutionary time, they don’t remain separate; they “converge backward” toward shared ancestors. The phrasing reverses the usual direction of the word “converge,” which we associate with convergent evolution (different lineages independently arriving at similar traits). Simpson flips the arrow to insist on a more basic truth: resemblance is often inheritance, not destiny or design.

“To different degrees” is the crucial qualifier. It nods to uneven rates of change, patchy fossil records, and the reality that some lineages retain ancestral features while others sprint into novelty. It’s also a quiet rebuke to simplistic either-or thinking: categories aren’t wrong, but they’re contingent, with fuzzy edges that depend on how far back you zoom.

Contextually, this is the mid-century fight to make taxonomy and paleontology speak the language of population genetics and deep time. The subtext: stop treating classification like a filing cabinet; start treating it like a family history, full of merges, gaps, and uncomfortable cousins.