Ernst Mayr Quotes
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The history of science knows scores of instances where an investigator was in the possession of all the important facts for a new theory but simply failed to ask the right questions.
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Scientific progress consists in the development of new concepts.
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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.
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There is more to biology than rats, Drosophila, Caenorhabditis, and E. coli.
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Most scientific problems are far better understood by studying their history than their logic.
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I feel that one species, mankind, doesn't have the right to exterminate.
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The issue, as correctly emphasized by Carl Sagan, is the probability of the evolution of high intelligence and an electronic civilization on an inhabited world. Once we have life (and almost surely it will be very different from life on Earth), what is the probability of its developing a lineage with high intelligence? On Earth, among millions of lineages of organisms and perhaps 50 billion speciation events, only one led to high intelligence; this makes me believe in its utter improbability.
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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 in the fossil record suddenly, not connected with their ancestors by a series of intermediates.
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It is curious how often erroneous theories have had a beneficial effect for particular branches of science.
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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.
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On Earth, among millions of lineages or organisms and perhaps 50 billion speciation events, only one led to high intelligence ; this makes me believe its utter improbablity.
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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) causes, the subject of natural history.
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Mathematics is as little a science as grammar is a language.
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Definitions are temporary verbalizations of concepts, and concepts- particularly difficult concepts- are usually revised repeatedly as our knowledge and understanding grows.
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Evolution ... is opportunistic, hence unpredictable.
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The most consequential change in man's view of the world, of living nature and of himself came with the introduction, over a period of some 100 years beginning only in the 18th century, of the idea of change itself, of change over periods of time: in a word, of evolution.
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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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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.
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A species is a reproductive community of populations reproductively isolated from others that occupies a specific niche in nature.
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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.