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The history of science knows scores of instances where an investigator was in the possession of all the important facts for a new theory but simply failed to ask the right questions.

Ernst Mayr

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Ernst Mayr
Age: 100 †
Born: 1904
Born: July 5
Died: 2005
Died: February 3
Biologist
Curator
Ornithologist
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Zoologist
Kempten/Allgäu
Ernst Walter Mayr
E. Mayr
E. W. Mayr
Facts
Instance
Right
Possession
Important
Questions
Investigator
Theory
Investigators
Simply
Scores
Asks
Instances
History
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Science
Failed

More quotes by Ernst Mayr

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It seems to me that for Darwin the pulsing of evolutionary rates was a strictly vertical phenomenon.
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I feel that one species, mankind, doesn't have the right to exterminate
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There is more to biology than rats, Drosophila, Caenorhabditis, and E. coli.
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Life is simply the reification of the process of living.
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Scientific progress consists in the development of new concepts.
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In neither his definition nor the examples illustrating what memes are does Dawkins mention anything that would distinguish memes from concepts.
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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.
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Evolution ... is opportunistic, hence unpredictable.
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I have the honesty to say I'm an Atheist. There is nothing that supports the idea of a personal God.
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most scientific problems are far better understood by studying their history than their logic.
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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.
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A new species develops if a population which has become geographically isolated from its parental species acquires during this period of isolation characters which promote or guarantee reproductive isolation when the external barriers break down.
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Definitions are temporary verbalizations of concepts, and concepts- particularly difficult concepts- are usually revised repeatedly as our knowledge and understanding grows.
Ernst Mayr
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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.
Ernst Mayr
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A species is a reproductive community of populations reproductively isolated from others that occupies a specific niche in nature.
Ernst Mayr
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Indeed, I was unable to find any evidence whatsoever of the occurrence of a drastic evolutionary acceleration and genetic reconstruction in widespread, populous species.
Ernst Mayr
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Evolution thus is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection.
Ernst Mayr
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Given the fact of evolution, one would expect the fossils to document a gradual steady change from ancestral forms to the descendants. But this is not what the paleontologist finds. Instead, he or she finds gaps in just about every phyletic series.
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It is curious how often erroneous theories have had a beneficial effect for particular branches of science.
Ernst Mayr
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The most consequential change in man's view of the world, of living nature and of himself came with the introduction, over a period of some 100 years beginning only in the 18th century, of the idea of change itself, of change over periods of time: in a word, of evolution.
Ernst Mayr