Naturalists and anthropologists have a certain view on nature. It's a tad dramatic but also elegant. Darwin usually stayed on topic and on message. He was offering up the greatest idea since science had been founded. Simpson rides that tide, but expresses the same wonderment.
The connection is greater than their shared wonder and academic specialty. In 1983 Simpson wrote The Book of Darwin, expounding on the implications of the then 124 year old Origin of the Species. Here I quote Attending Marvels by Simpson and the Origin of the Species by the master himself.
"It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have been produced by the laws acting around us."
"As we came home the sun went out suddenly and the whole world turned a sinister gray, dark and light but without a spot of clor. Streaked vicious clouds poured over us like a flood from the west. the moon rose yellow through the last band of clear sky. Rain began to patter, then to pour. Surf is roaring again on the shores of the lake. beyond this element-tormented spot lies vast, desolate patagonia. Beyond Patagonia lies the world of the seas and plains and mountains for complacent thousands of miles. Beyond the world wheels the dusty universe."
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