Ernst Mayr Quotes

Agricultural practice served Darwin as the material basis for the elaboration of his theory of Evolution, which explained the natural causation of the adaptation we see in the structure of the organic world. That was a great advance in the knowledge of living nature.

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes, Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn't take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.

Evolution is among the most well-established theories in the scientific community. To doubt it sounds to biologists as absurd as denying relativity does to physicists.

I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change - led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.

God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed - that is the meaning of evolution.

Natural selection is not evolution.

The more specific idea of Evolution now reached is - a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter.

My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted.

Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability

Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.

Our physiological constitution is obviously a product of Darwinian processes, insofar as you buy the evolutional theory as a generative, as an account of the mechanism that generated us. Our physiology evolved, our behaviors evolved, and our accounts of those behaviors, both successful and unsuccessful, evolved.

Evolution is all about looking forward.

This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.

Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science - in all of biology.

For me, the level at which natural selection causes the phenomenon of adaptation is the level of the replicator - the gene.

A probing analysis of the problems of evolution forms the basis of my prose.

First, Darwinian theory tells us how a certain amount of diversity in life forms can develop once we have various types of complex living organisms already in existence.

Evolution is not a force but a process. Not a cause but a law.

Spencer's god was Evolution, sometimes also called Progress.

If evolution is outlawed, only outlaws will evolve.

There are no shortcuts in evolution.

A major fault, for example, is the fact that, along with the materialist principle, Darwin introduced into his theory of evolution reactionary Malthusian ideas.

As Darwin himself was at pains to point out, natural selection is all about differential survival within species, not between them.

Evolution is a fact. It is the best explanation of what is known from observations. It's a theory as powerful as the theory of gravity.