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It seems to me that for Darwin the pulsing of evolutionary rates was a strictly vertical phenomenon.
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Life is simply the reification of the process of living.
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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.
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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
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Most scientific problems are far better understood by studying their history than their logic.
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It is quite true, as several recent authors have indicated, that Darwin's book was misnamed, because it is a book on evolutionary changes in general and the factors that control them (selectivity, and so forth), but not a treatise on the origin of species.
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In science one learns not only by one's own mistakes but by the history of the mistakes of others.
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Scientific progress consists in the development of new concepts.
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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.
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The theory of evolution is quite rightly called the greatest unifying theory in biology.
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What is still lacking is a critical analysis of the writings of the architects of the synthesis.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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In neither his definition nor the examples illustrating what memes are does Dawkins mention anything that would distinguish memes from concepts.
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The finding of a suitable mate for the "hopeless monster" and the establishment of reproductive isolation from the normal members of the parental population seem to me insurmountable difficulties [of survival].
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Why did it take so long for evolution to be seriously proposed? And why did Darwinism face such an uphill battle after it was proposed? The reason is that Darwin challenged some of the basic beliefs of his age. Four of them were pillars of Christina dogma.
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Biology was referred to as a "dirty science," an activity, according to the physicist Ernest Rutherford, not much better than "postage stamp collecting." At best it was a second-class, "provincial" science.
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I had found again and again that the most aberrant population of a species - often having reached species rank, and occasionally classified even as a separate genus - occurred at a peripheral location, indeed usually at the most isolated peripheral location.
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Our understanding of the world is achieved more effectively by conceptual improvements than by discovery of new facts
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There is more to biology than rats, Drosophila, Caenorhabditis, and E. coli.
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The use of keys in identification is old indeed. Much of Aristotle's classifications of animals was presented in the form of simple dichotomous alternatives.
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As a consequence, geneticists described evolution simply as a change in gene frequencies in populations, totally ignoring the fact that evolution consists of the two simultaneous but quite separate phenomena of adaptation and diversification.
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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.
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New gene pools are generated in every generation, and evolution takes place because the successful individuals produced by these gene pools give rise to the next generation.
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A species consists of a group of populations which replace each other geographically or ecologically and of which the neighboring ones integrate or hybridise wherever they are in contact or which are potentially capable of doing so (with one or more of the populations) in those cases where contact is prevented by geographical or ecological barriers.
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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.
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Isolating mechanisms are biological properties of individuals that prevent the interbreeding of populations that are actually or potentially sympatric.
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It is curious how often erroneous theories have had a beneficial effect for particular branches of science.
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Ernst Mayr
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Born:
July 5, 1904
Died:
February 3, 2005
(aged 100)
Bio:
Ernst Walter Mayr was one of the 20th century's leading evolutionary biologists. He was also a renowned taxonomist, tropical explorer, ornithologist, and historian of science.
Known for:
What Evolution Is (1964)
Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942)
Animal species and evolution (1963)
Das ist Biologie (1997)
Most used words:
species
evolution
populations
evolutionary
darwin
geographically
years
generation
biological
study
forms
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