Ernst Mayr Quotes

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

Ernst Mayr

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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.

  

  Ernst Mayr
  • Population
  • Location
  • Rank

• 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 of paleontology. Following phyletic lines through time seemed to reveal only minimal gradual changes but no clear evidence for any change of a species into a different genus or for the gradual origin of an evolutionary novelty. Anything truly novel always seemed to appear quite abruptly in the fossil record.

  

  Ernst Mayr
  • Changes
  • Record
  • Evidence

• 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
  • Population
  • Species
  • Barriers

• Isolating mechanisms are biological properties of individuals that prevent the interbreeding of populations that are actually or potentially sympatric.

  

  Ernst Mayr
  • Populations
  • Properties
  • Biological

• It seems to me that for Darwin the pulsing of evolutionary rates was a strictly vertical phenomenon.

  

  Ernst Mayr
  • Phenomenon
  • Evolutionary
  • Rates

• 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
  • Author
  • Evolution
  • Theory

• Evolution thus is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection.

  

  Ernst Mayr
  • Evolution
  • Selection
  • Darwin

• I have the honesty to say I'm an Atheist. There is nothing that supports the idea of a personal God.

  

  Ernst Mayr
  • God
  • Atheist
  • Supports

• 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 truths of population zoology: (1) no two individuals are alike, and (2) both environment and genetic endowment make a contribution to nearly every trait.

  

  Ernst Mayr
  • Environment
  • Mistakes
  • Politician

• Two forms or species are sympatric, if they occur together, that is if their areas of distribution overlap or coincide. Two forms (or species) are allapatric, if they do not occur together, that is if they exclude each other geographically. The term allopatric is primarily useful in denoting geographic representatives.

  

  Ernst Mayr
  • Species
  • Representatives
  • Coincide

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

  

  Ernst Mayr
  • Definition
  • illustrating
  • Memes

• 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
  • Environment
  • Opportunities
  • Novel

• Life is simply the reification of the process of living.

  

  Ernst Mayr
  • Process
  • Life is

• Indeed, I was unable to find any evidence whatsoever of the occurrence of a drastic evolutionary acceleration and genetic reconstruction in widespread, populous species.

  

  Ernst Mayr
  • Evidence
  • Species
  • Reconstruction

• 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 was offered in the Linnean Society that was the most important thing in my life.

  

  Ernst Mayr
  • Friendship
  • New York
  • Stranger

• 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 to be unsatisfactory. Hence, a change of mind in a scientist, and particularly in a great scientist, is not only not a sign of weakness but rather evidence for continuing attention to the respective problem and an ability to test the hypothesis again and again.

  

  Ernst Mayr
  • Problem
  • Evidence
  • Scientist

• 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 not what the paleontologist finds. Instead, he or she finds gaps in just about every phyletic series.

  

  Ernst Mayr
  • Change
  • Evolution
  • Document

• To take an unequivocal stand, it seems to me, is of greater heuristic value and far more likely to stimulate constructive criticism than to evade the issue.

  

  Ernst Mayr
  • Value
  • Criticism
  • Issue

• A new species develops if a population which has become geographically isolated from its parental species acquires during this period of isolation characters which promote or guarantee reproductive isolation when the external barriers break down.

  

  Ernst Mayr
  • Characters
  • Isolation
  • Guarantee

• 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
  • Change
  • Novelty
  • Evolutionary

• 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 then on Sunday get down on his knees and pray to God. Frankly I've never been able to understand it because you would need two totally different compartments in your brain, one that deals with religion and the other with everything else.

  

  Ernst Mayr
  • God
  • Religion
  • Scientists

• Anyone who writes about "Darwin's theory of evolutionin the singular, without segregating the theories of gradual evolution, common descent, speciation, and the mechanism of natural selection, will be quite unable to discuss the subject competently.

  

  Ernst Mayr
  • Evolution
  • Discuss
  • Mechanism

• 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
  • Generation
  • Evolution
  • Selection

• 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 carried with them only a very small proportion of the variability of the parent population. This 'founder' principle sometimes explains even the uniformity of rather large populations, particularly if they are well isolated and near the borders of the range of the species.

  

  Ernst Mayr
  • Parent
  • Female
  • Borders