Ernst Mayr Quotes

Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create.

Natural selection is not evolution.

Evolution is all about passing on the genome to the next generation, adapting and surviving through generation after generation. From an evolutionary point of view, you and I are like the booster rockets designed to send the genetic payload into the next level of orbit and then drop off into the sea.

Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work - the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection.

The fuel for evolution is diversity, with natural selection leading to continuous adaptations and improvements in Nature's handiwork.

Just like mutations to DNA in biological organisms allow for evolution through natural selection, forking lets us run multiple experiments in parallel where the strongest versions survive.

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.

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

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 - evolutionary change - does not happen quickly.

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

Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion.

My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted.

Evolution is the most popular way we have for dealing with change.

This preservation of favourable variations and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest. Variations neither useful nor injurious would not be affected by natural selection and would be left a fluctuating element.

In general, the larger the breeding population, the slower the rate of evolution.

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

Evolution is a tinkerer.

There are good reasons why natural selection has become widely accepted as an explanation of evolutionary development. When applied to mammals and other large animals, it fits perfectly. But we cannot assume that all evolutionary steps arise from selection, particularly when looking at smaller animals.

If you watch animals objectively for any length of time, you're driven to the conclusion that their main aim in life is to pass on their genes to the next generation.

In the game of life, less diversity means fewer options for change. Wild or domesticated, panda or pea, adaptation is the requirement for survival.

Natural selection will not remove ignorance from future generations.

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.

With evolution, things are always changing, so I sort of think: Should we all be growing three heads?