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Biology Quote by Ernst Mayr

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““I published that theory [of speciational evolution] in a 1954 paper…and I clearly related it to paleontology. Darwin argued that the fossil record is very incomplete because some species fossilize better than others... I noted that you are never going to find evidence of a small local population that changed very rapidly in the fossil record... Gould was my course assistant at Harvard where I presented this theory again and again for three years. So he knew it thoroughly. So did Eldredge. In fact, in his 1971 paper Eldredge credited me with it. But that was lost over time.””

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All I claimed was that when a drastic change occurs, it occurs in a relatively small and isolated population.

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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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