Quotes from Ernst Mayr

A species is a reproductive community of populations reproductively isolated from others that occupies a specific niche in nature.

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

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.

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.

Mathematics is as little a science as grammar is a language.

Our understanding of the world is achieved more effectively by conceptual improvements than by discovery of new facts

Life is simply the reification of the process of living.

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.

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

Scientific progress consists in the development of new concepts.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Truly, Buffon was the father of all thought in natural history in the second half of the 18th century.

The funny thing is if in England, you ask a man in the street who the greatest living Darwinian is, he will say Richard Dawkins . And indeed, Dawkins has done a marvelous job of popularizing Darwinism . But Dawkins ' basic theory of the gene being the object of evolution is totally non- Darwinian .

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 simultaneous but quite separate phenomena of adaptation and diversification.

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.

Most of them are doomed to rapid extinction, but a few may make evolutionary inventions, such as physiological, ecological, or behavioral innovations that give these species improved competitive potential.

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.

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.