James Young Simpson (3 August 1873 – 20 May 1934) was a Scottish zoologist, writer, diplomat, biographer and theologian.

After World War I, he was instrumental in establishing the Baltic states and Finland as independent nations.

James Young Simpson was born at 52 Queen Street in Edinburgh on 3 August 1873 to Margaret Stewart Barbour, sister of Alexander Hugh Freeland Barbour, and Sir Alexander Russell Simpson (1835–1916), professor of midwifery at the University of Edinburgh.

[1] His father was a nephew of his namesake, James Young Simpson, the first person to use chloroform as an anesthetic on humans.

[2] After two summers as a research student at Christ's College, Cambridge (1899/1900), he completed his DSc in 1901 at the University of Edinburgh.

He is buried with his parents in the south-west section of Grange Cemetery close to the rear embankment behind the central vaults.

[7] In a later book, Nature: Cosmic, Human and Divine (1929), Simpson argues that religion results from the confrontation of Mind with the Infinite Energy of the universe as suggested by Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle.

[8] Simpson's association with Russia began when Prince Nicholas Galitsyn visited Edinburgh in the early 1890s.

In September 1910, Simpson accompanied his father to a medical congress in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) in Russia.