* Kelle Dhein is an Omidyar Complexity Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. He works on the history and philosophy of behavioral experiments, Indigenous bioethics, and the influence of cybernetics and other “information age” movements on the epistemology of behavior. He writes…

Nearing the end of a prominent career, it’s customary for scientists to look back, take stock, and offer some reflections on what they accomplished, who they became, and how their field changed. This tradition has been a boon to historians of science. But the history of science would be richer still if scientists adopted the custom of writing novels at the ends of their careers. Old academics are invariably strange, and the medium of fiction is so well suited to conveying that strangeness. At least, these were my parting thoughts after finishing George Gaylord Simpson’s science fiction novella, The Dechronization of Sam Magruder.

No doubt, many readers of Extinct are already familiar with Simpson and his contributions to paleontology and evolutionary theory. I did everything backwards and went into the story knowing almost nothing about Simpson. I remembered he was a paleontologist, and I think I once read that as a Harvard graduate student, E.O. Wilson feuded with Simpson—but this potentially apocryphal tidbit was all I had for color. After finishing the book, I was eager to put a face to Simpson’s name, and I found one in the Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society (Whittington 1986).

This sepia-toned photo was taken the same year Simpson died, in 1984. It shows him standing in a book-lined office looking slightly down into the viewer, as though we’re an interesting specimen momentarily distracting him from the book he’s holding, Fossils and the History of Life. Simpson’s bald head and thick van dyke facial hair are striking, but I’m drawn to his outfit. He’s wearing a multicolor polo, tucked in, with the buttons all the way up. He’s also sporting a bolo tie. You meet all kinds in academia, and although I cannot articulate why, these sartorial choices give me a strong impression of how Simpson maneuvered a conversation. After collecting the face, I began reading Simpson’s work and the commentaries it inspired. But before bringing that to bear on my exegesis of The Dechronization of Sam Magruder, it’s worth sketching the plot.

Sam Magruder is a chronologist (time scientist) living in the 22nd century. He invents a device that dramatically slows down one’s experience of time. He uses this device to slow down time so much that he experiences time’s discrete nature and slips between time quanta. Having become unstuck in time, Magruder is equally likely to reappear at any moment in the past 10 billion years. Traveling forward in time is impossible because the future doesn’t exist. Only the past is real. Magruder, whom both Stephen Jay Gould and Simpson’s daughter, Joan Burns, identify as a stand-in for Simpson himself, happens to reappear in modern day New Mexico during the Cretaceous. The novel is epistolary in the sense that the story is supposed to have been carved onto stone tablets by Magruder after he traveled to the past. The reader is introduced to these recently unearthed tablets via a group of future academics who have begun holding regular meetings to read and discuss Magruder’s story.

As a novelist, Simpson is often heavy handed. For instance, when describing Magruder’s use of the slow down device, he seems quite taken with the image of a man disappearing so that only his clothes are left piled on the floor. To ensure the reader fully appreciates this visual gag, he repeats the same description with minor alterations three times in a single page. In another attempt at humor, Simpson spends a surprising amount of time showing how drinking alcohol (which has become an archaic drug in the future) makes the academics pronounce the letter “s” like “sh”. In his analysis of the novel, Gould (119) singles this bit out as “pretty crude” and offers the observation that he “never saw [Simpson] relaxed or happy” without alcohol and tobacco. Science fiction writers have a bad reputation for taking great care to explain new ideas or technologies while neglecting the interpersonal relations that drive literary narratives forward. The Dechronization of Sam Magruder often realizes this stereotype. The complete absence of women is emblematic of this imbalance. Although the existence of women is alluded to, the story exclusively concerns men with terminal degrees.

Yet behind all the clumsiness, there are hints of subtle world-building. The exposition is sprinkled with details that paint a picture of future society as simultaneously multicultural, pluralistic, strictly regimented, and preoccupied with racial ancestry. People speak “Interlingual Swahili” and have names like “Kto”, “Fatima”, “Hsuan”, and “Mary”. But there also seems to be a second naming system. Under a newspaper picture of Magruder, it reads “Samuel TM12SC48 Magruder AChA3*” (Simpson 1997, 18). Future academics interpret this photo and title in the following way (Simpson ibid):

No epicanthus. Somewhat flattened nose. Perhaps the nose and the hair reflected the one-fifth mongoloid ancestry indicated by the middle-name symbols, but the caucasoid had predominated. Ancestors technicians and scientists. Top marks in citizenship school and in chronologists' professional school. Decorated three times for achievement. Quite a boy!

“Citizenship schools” are referenced two more times. First, when Magruder remembers his adopted daughter:

I was very fond of her and I think she liked me all right, but she will not miss me much, and frankly I do not miss her as much as I do most of my friends. She was away at citizenship schools most of the time, of course, and I was someone to pay the bills and to indulge her when she came home on vacations. When the time-slip came, she was old enough to be interested mostly in boys and had no time for me. That is normal, and it was normal, too, for my interests to move away from her as she developed away from me.

The second reference is an offhand remark near the end, where Magruder claims to have learned “a fair smattering of genetics and of practical animal breeding” while in citizenship school.

For being so ham-fisted in his delivery of certain scenes, Simpson is conspicuously silent about how he or any of his characters feel about this brave new world. Simpson criticized fascism in other writing, and especially opposed biological arguments that framed fascism as the next step in human evolution (Nyhart and Lidgard 2021). In the context of his evolutionary theorizing, Simpson’s critique of fascism was related to his elevation of the individual as the locus of evolutionary events (Simpson 1941; Nyhart and Lidgard 2021). Naming people via a standardized notation system that communicates educational achievement, occupation, and racial ancestry feels vaguely fascist and anti-individual, so I tend to interpret Simpson’s portrayal of the future as dystopian. Whatever is going on in Simpson’s future, ancestry, lineage, heritable traits, standardization, and education are overarching themes.

What about the dinosaurs? If you grew up watching Disney’s Fantasia as often as I did, then you already have the idea. Simpson’s dinosaurs are dim, languid, and brutal. For instance, long-necked Diplodocus is depicted as a swamp dweller with “crimson eyes and a vapid grin” (Simpson 1997, 34). Magruder is routinely charged by T-rexes, but he easily avoids them by standing still until the last second and then jumping out of the way. Once Magruder is out of sight, the T-rex’s “tiny reptilian brain” can’t remember that it was chasing prey mere seconds ago (Simpson 1997, 53). The dinosaurs are also cold-blooded and inactive at night.

But avoiding predators isn’t the only obstacle to Sam’s survival. He must also find shelter, make tools, fashion clothing, hunt, start fires, and track seasons. At one point, he catches a mystery illness that causes him to hallucinate. Faced with such mortal perils in a foreign place and time, one might imagine Magruder would struggle to stay alive. But as it turns out, the North American Cretaceous is no match for a 22nd century man with a STEM Ph.D. Despite plenty of complaining, Magruder builds a niche for himself in a matter of days. There’s a weary sort of “Aww Shucks Git-R-Done” optimism that pervades Magruder’s narration. I equate this voice with mid 20th century American exceptionalism about the individual’s capacity for self-reliance through rational action. Basically, Magruder (who, again, is a stand-in for Simpson) demonstrates the extraordinary adaptability and potential evolutionary fitness of well-educated American men.

This brings us to the most interesting part of Simpson’s story. After establishing himself in the Cretaceous, Magruder finds that he can trap little mouse-like creatures for fur. He then realizes that these creatures are the ancestors of all humanity (Simpson 1997, 101):

What a future! Insignificant now, rather unpleasant (to tell the truth), this little brute was the ancestor of the lords of the earth! His blood flows in my own veins. His descendants would inherit seme spark that would keep them fighting successfully in the long struggle for survival. They would come into their own long after the great dinosaurs had failed. Is it not, indeed, that drive that animates me now? […] You, with your culture and civilization, are the outcome of his struggles and the realization of his potentialities.

It occurs to Magruder that he can play God by selectively breeding these mammals to speed up their evolution. But he refrains on the grounds that such guidance would be sacrilege. “What is holy in mankind is that mankind, through this little beast and so many others, has created itself,” Magruder declares (Simpson 1997, 102).

When contextualized within Simpson’s professional career and research, Magruder’s encounter with early mammals becomes a thought experiment about orthogenesis. Orthogenesis is the idea that evolution is guided toward some goal by an unspecified force characteristic of living systems. Simpson attacked this view of evolution throughout his career. Instead, he argued that organisms have the potential to evolve different solutions to problems of survival and reproduction. He also argued that variations between individuals appear in an unpredictable and nondirected manner. The upshot is that one cannot know in advance which chance variation will arise to solve what problem (Beatty 2008).

Magruder is a concrete analog to the unspecified force that is supposed to guide evolution in orthogenesis. It is assumed he has the power to direct mammalian evolution toward a goal. But the argument implicit in the story isn’t about the epistemological merits (or demerits) of orthogenesis. It’s about the ethical valence of different views of evolution. Simpson argues that we ought to prefer a chancy, purposeless view of evolution because of its philosophical ramifications for how we understand ourselves.

Purposeless evolution opens a vacuum of agency that we, as individual organisms, can fill. According to Simpson, individual organisms can chart their own evolutionary trajectories via the choices they make, and because humans do this with consciousness awareness, we have increased powers of self-direction. Consider this quote from Simpson’s 1949 book, The Meaning of Evolution (310):

Man has risen, not fallen. He can choose to develop his capacities as the highest animal and to try to rise still farther, or he can choose otherwise. The choice is his responsibility, and his alone. There is no automatism that will carry him upward without choice or effort and there is no trend solely in the right direction. Evolution has no purpose; man must supply this for himself.

(Parenthetically, I cannot help but read the above quote with the same voice Mr. Lebowski uses to deliver the following lines in The Big Lebowski:

My wife is not the issue here. I hope that my wife will someday learn to live on her allowance, which is ample, but if she doesn't, sir, that will be her problem, not mine, just as your rug is your problem, just as every bum's lot in life is his own responsibility regardless of whom he chooses to blame. I didn't blame anyone for the loss of my legs, some [redacted] in Korea took them from me but I went out and achieved anyway. I can't solve your problems, sir, only you can.”)

An American ethos permeates this view of evolution. We are a species of self-made go-getters using grit and cleverness to take advantage of any opportunity that arises to better solve life’s problems. In the end, all of us are responsible for our own individual choices. If, as a species, we all make good individual choices, then we can manifest a good evolutionary destiny. The purposelessness of evolution gives organisms the freedom to eventually transform themselves into all manner of things provided they make the right choices. Part of what makes an evolutionary destiny good is that it is earned and deserved. If some outside power offered to keep humans on a good evolutionary trajectory with no input from us, that would be disgraceful because it would rob us of our autonomy and dignity. All this is in line with Nyhart and Lidgard’s (2021, 208) suggestion that “[Simpson’s] insistence on placing causal agency at a lower level [i.e. the individual] provided a rational and consistent scientific position uniting deeply held convictions, and that those convictions in turn provided moral force for his reductionism.”

I am not here to disparage Simpson’s apparent melding of American ideology and evolutionary philosophy. Nor am I here for strong social constructivist arguments about scientific knowledge. My point is less philosophical and more historical. It’s about the richness of fiction as a medium for communicating what Jakob von Uexküll called a scientist’s Umwelt, or the way a scientist’s goals, capacities, and measuring apparatuses shape their inner world. Uexküll writes that the above image,

[…] shows the Umwelt of an astronomer, which is the easiest to portray. High on his tower, as far as possible from the earth, sits a human being. He has so transformed his eyes, with the aid of gigantic optical instruments, that they have become fit to penetrate the universe up to its most distant stars. In his Umwelt, suns and planets circle in festive procession. Fleet-footed light takes millions of years to travel through his Umwelt space. And yet this whole Umwelt is only a tiny sector of nature, tailored to the faculties of a human subject. (Uexküll 1992, 389–390)

In The Dechronization of Sam Magruder, Simpson offers a rare glimpse into an Umwelt that exerted extraordinary influence on 20th century biology. I have criticized the literary dimension of Simpson’s story because Simpson’s efforts merit that level of analysis, not to poke fun at scientists venturing into fields of humanistic creative expression. Indeed, transmitting scientific communications through such humanistic channels can only enlarge our understanding of science.

References

Beatty, J. 2008. Chance variation and evolutionary contingency: Darwin, Simpson, The Simpsons, and Gould. In M. Ruse (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Biology (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Nyhart, L.K., and Lidgard, S. 2021. "Revisiting George Gaylord Simpson’s “The Role of the Individual in Evolution”(1941)." Biological Theory 16:203–212.

Simpson, G.G. 1941. The role of the individual in evolution. Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences 31:1–20.

Simpson, G.G. 1949. The Meaning of Evolution: A Study of the History of Life and of its Significance for Man. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Simpson, G.G. 1997. The Dechronization of Sam Magruder: A Novel. Macmillan.

Von Uexküll, J. 1992. A stroll through the worlds of animals and men: A picture book of invisible worlds. Semiotica 89:319–391. https://doi.org/10.1515/semi.1992.89.4.319

Whittington, H.B. 1986. George Gaylord Simpson, 16 June 1902-6 October 1984. Biographical Memoirs of the Royal Society 525–539.