Ernst Mayr Quotes

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It seems to me that for Darwin the pulsing of evolutionary rates was a strictly vertical phenomenon.

Ernst Mayr
Life is simply the reification of the process of living.

Ernst Mayr
According to the concept of transformational evolution, first clearly articulated by Lamarck, evolution consists of the gradual transformation of organisms from one condition of existence to another

Ernst Mayr
Evolution, thus, is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection. No longer is a fixed object transformed, as in transformational evolution, but an entirely new start is, so to speak, made in every generation.

Ernst Mayr
There are a number of attributes of species and populations that are not of any particular selective advantage to any single individual in a population but that are of great advantage to the population as a whole.

Ernst Mayr
Isolating mechanisms are biological properties of individuals that prevent the interbreeding of populations that are actually or potentially sympatric.

Ernst Mayr
There is more to biology than rats, Drosophila, Caenorhabditis, and E. coli.

Ernst Mayr
Any scientific revolution has to accept all sorts of black boxes, for if one had to wait until all black boxes are opened, one would never have any conceptual advances.

Ernst Mayr
Scientific progress consists in the development of new concepts.

Ernst Mayr
Our understanding of the world is achieved more effectively by conceptual improvements than by discovery of new facts

Ernst Mayr
Having reached the rare age of 100 years, I find myself in a unique position: I'm the last survivor of the golden age of the Evolutionary Synthesis. That status encourages me to present a personal account of what I experienced in the years (1920s to the 1950s) that were so crucial in the history of evolutionary biology.

Ernst Mayr
The major novelty of my theory was its claim that the most rapid evolutionary change does not occur in widespread, populous species, as claimed by Most geneticists, but in small founder populations.

Ernst Mayr
Living in an entirely different physical as well as biotic environment, such a population would have unique opportunities to enter new niches and to select novel adaptive pathways.

Ernst Mayr
The theory of evolution is quite rightly called the greatest unifying theory in biology.

Ernst Mayr
Parasitologists have accumulated, during the past decades, an amount of information that is truly formidable. This information is not only valuable for the parasitologist, but is also a potential gold-mine for the evolutionist and general biologist. Yet, much of this information is hidden away in a widely scattered and highly technical literature.

Ernst Mayr
Indeed, I was unable to find any evidence whatsoever of the occurrence of a drastic evolutionary acceleration and genetic reconstruction in widespread, populous species.

Ernst Mayr
It is curious how often erroneous theories have had a beneficial effect for particular branches of science.

Ernst Mayr
Biology can be divided into the study of proximate causes, the study of the physiological sciences (broadly conceived), and into the study of ultimate (evolutionary) causes, the subject of natural history.

Ernst Mayr
A species is a reproductive community of populations (reproductively isolated from others) that occupies a specific niche in nature.

Ernst Mayr
It may not be exaggeration if I say that there are probably as many species concepts as there are thinking systematists and students of speciation.

Ernst Mayr
Evolution as such is no longer a theory for a modern author. It is as much a fact as that the earth revolves around the sun.

Ernst Mayr
Given the fact of evolution, one would expect the fossils to document a gradual steady change from ancestral forms to the descendants. But this is not what the paleontologist finds. Instead, he or she finds gaps in just about every phyletic series.

Ernst Mayr
Two forms or species are sympatric, if they occur together, that is if their areas of distribution overlap or coincide. Two forms (or species) are allopatric, if they do not occur together, that is if they exclude each other geographically. The term allopatric is primarily useful in denoting geographic representatives.

Ernst Mayr
Research not only brings us abundant joy but it also gives us a deep sense of humility.

Ernst Mayr
Biological classifications have two major objectives: to serve as a basis of biological generalizations in all sort of comparative studies and to serve as a key to an information storage system... Is the classification that is soundest as a basis of generalizations also most convenient for information retrieval? This, indeed, seems to have been true in most cases I have encountered.

Ernst Mayr