Ernst Mayr Quotes

The divergence of songs in the new population away from those in the progenitor population would only be prevented if these processes were balanced by repeated immigration and subsequent breeding: song flow.

We observe closely related species in sympatry and infer how they evolved from a common ancestor.

I did not claim that speciation occurs only in founder populations.

A race is what zoologists term a variety or subdivision of a species.

The theory of founder effects does not explain how novel features like plumage traits arise.

Natural selection certainly operates. It explains how bacteria will gain antibiotic resistance; it will explain how insects get insecticide resistance, but it doesn't explain how you get bacteria or insects in the first place.

Splitting and gradual divergence of genera is exemplified very well and in a large variety of organisms.

The evolution of sex is the hardest problem in evolutionary biology.

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.

The process of speciation is completed with the cessation of genetic exchange.

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

The way to understand how different species evolved is to think about the niches that they fill in an ecosystem - basically, how they make a living.

Unfortunately, with dinosaurs, we haven't had enough specimens to determine how much variation there is within a species.

… isolation, by checking immigration and consequently competition, will give time for any new variety to be slowly improved; and this may sometimes be of importance in the production of new species.

In the course of evolution, it constantly happens that, independently of each other, two different forms of life take similar, parallel paths in adapting themselves to the same external circumstances.

The living world is not a single array... connected by unbroken series of intergrades.

There is a tendency in nature to the continued progression of certain classes of varieties further and further from the original type.

There are no shortcuts in evolution.

That the variability of an organism to a certain extent is a constant and certain condition of life we admit, otherwise there would be no distinguishable individuals of a species.

On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation.

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.

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.

Exchange of breeding individuals between two populations tends to homogenize their gene pools.

But naturalists are now beginning to look beyond this, and to see that there must be some other principle regulating the infinitely varied forms of animal life.

In an age of molecular genomics, it is ever more apparent that the fingerprints of evolution are pressed deeply into human DNA, just as they are into the genomes of every other organism. Biologists understand this, and so do students who study the science of life.