Quotes from Ernst W. Mayr

The searching human mind is not satisfied merely to discover facts. We also want to know how things happen and why.

And it is this randomness of variation that is responsible for the enormous, often quite bizarre diversity of the living world.

A plant on the edge of a desert is said to struggle for life against the drought, though more properly it should be said to be dependent on the moisture

No amphibian succeeded in adapting to salt water.

No one could have predicted that a defenseless, slow-moving biped should become the pinnacle of Creation.

Some insignificant and probably nocturnal mammals also survived and experienced in the Paleocene and Eocene a spectacular radiation, producing all the orders and many of the families of the now living mammals.

The final proof as to whether a certain habitat form has a genetic basis or is entirely phenotypical can be found only through experiments.

Therefore, it came as a terrible shock to the Victorian age when Darwin, following his theory of common descent, incorporated the human species into the animal kingdom as a descendant of primate ancestors.

To use the molecular clock in such a way requires the calibration of its "ticking rate.

The principle of adaptationism has been adopted so widely by Darwinians because it is such a heuristic methodology.

This uneven rate of evolution of different properties of an organism is called mosaic evolution , and it may create difficulties for classification.

Furthermore, it is observed in general that the smaller the population size of a species is, the more vulnerable it will be to extinction.

Darwin completely rejected typological thinking and introduced instead the entirely different concept now called population thinking. All groupings of living organisms, including humanity, are populations that consist of uniquely different individuals. By rejecting the constancy of populations, Darwin helped to introduce history into scientific thinking and to promote a distinctly new approach to explanatory interpretation in science.