Ernst Mayr Quotes

44 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
Most scientific problems are far better understood by studying their history than their logic.

Ernst Mayr
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.

Ernst Mayr
In science one learns not only by one's own mistakes but by the history of the mistakes of others.

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

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
What is still lacking is a critical analysis of the writings of the architects of the synthesis.

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
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
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
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
In neither his definition nor the examples illustrating what memes are does Dawkins mention anything that would distinguish memes from concepts.

Ernst Mayr
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].

Ernst Mayr
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.

Ernst Mayr
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.

Ernst Mayr
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.

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

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

Ernst Mayr
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.

Ernst Mayr
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.

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
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.

Ernst Mayr
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.

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

Ernst Mayr