The reduced variability of small populations is not always due to accidental gene loss, but sometimes to the fact that the entire population was started by a single pair or by a single fertilized female. These 'founders' of the population… — Ernst Mayr Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
There is more to biology than rats, Drosophila, Caenorhabditis, and E. coli. — Ernst Mayr Copy Share Image
“The funny thing is if in England, you ask a man in the street who the greatest living Darwinian is, he will say Richard… — Ernst Mayr Copy Share Image
The history of science knows scores of instances where an investigator was in the possession of all the important facts for a new theory… — Ernst Mayr Copy Share Image
most scientific problems are far better understood by studying their history than their logic. — Ernst Mayr Copy Share Image
Evolution, thus, is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection. No longer is a fixed object transformed, as in transformational… — Ernst Mayr Copy Share Image
In Earth, among millions of lineages or organisms and perhaps 50 billion speciation events, only one led to high intelligence ; this makes me… — Ernst Mayr Copy Share Image
I have the honesty to say I'm an Atheist. There is nothing that supports the idea of a personal God. — Ernst Mayr Copy Share Image
All I claimed was that when a drastic change occurs, it occurs in a relatively small and isolated population. — Ernst Mayr Copy Share Image
A new species develops if a population which has become geographically isolated from its parental species acquires during this period of isolation characters which… — Ernst Mayr Copy Share Image
According to the concept of transformational evolution, first clearly articulated by Lamarck, evolution consists of the gradual transformation of organisms from one condition of… — Ernst Mayr Copy Share Image
Our understanding of the world is achieved more effectively by conceptual improvements than by discovery of new facts — Ernst Mayr Copy Share Image
