Ernst Mayr Quotes

45 quotes in 771 categories

• 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)…
• It is curious how often erroneous theories have had a beneficial effect for particular branches of science.
• All interpretations made by a scientist are hypotheses, and all hypotheses are tentative. They must forever be tested and they must be revised if found…
• I have the honesty to say I'm an Atheist. There is nothing that supports the idea of a personal God.
• On the other hand, famous evolutionists such as Dobzhansky were firm believers in a personal God. He would work as a scientist all week and…
• Evolution ... is opportunistic, hence unpredictable.
• A species is a reproductive community of populations reproductively isolated from others that occupies a specific niche in nature.
• 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…
• Paleontologists had long been aware of a seeming contradiction between Darwin's postulate of gradualism, confirmed by the work of population genetics, and the actual findings…
• Every politician, clergyman, educator, or physician, in short, anyone dealing with human individuals, is bound to make grave mistakes if he ignores these two great…
• 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…
• 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,…
• 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…
• 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…
• Wherever we look at the living biota … discontinuities are overwhelmingly frequent…The discontinuities are even more striking in the fossil record. New species usually appear…
• 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…
• Isolating mechanisms are biological properties of individuals that prevent the interbreeding of populations that are actually or potentially sympatric.
• Indeed, I was unable to find any evidence whatsoever of the occurrence of a drastic evolutionary acceleration and genetic reconstruction in widespread, populous species.
• In those early years in New York when I was a stranger in a big city, it was the companionship and later friendship which I…
• 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…

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