Evolution thus is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection. Ernst Mayr Read Quote
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. Ernst Mayr Read Quote
It seems to me that for Darwin the pulsing of evolutionary rates was a strictly vertical phenomenon. Ernst Mayr Read Quote
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. Ernst Mayr Read Quote
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. Ernst Mayr Read Quote
All I claimed was that when a drastic change occurs, it occurs in a relatively small and isolated population. Ernst Mayr Read Quote
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. Ernst Mayr Read Quote
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. Ernst Mayr Read Quote
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. Ernst Mayr Read Quote
