11 Quotes by Ernst W. Mayr

The searching human mind is not satisfied merely to discover facts. We also want to know how things happen and why.

A plant on the edge of a desert is said to struggle for life against the drought, though more properly it should be said to be dependent on the moisture.

And it is this randomness of variation that is responsible for the enormous, often quite bizarre diversity of the living world.

No amphibian succeeded in adapting to salt water.

No one could have predicted that a defenseless, slow-moving biped should become the pinnacle of Creation.

This uneven rate of evolution of different properties of an organism is called mosaic evolution, and it may create difficulties for classification.

Some insignificant and probably nocturnal mammals also survived and experienced in the Paleocene and Eocene a spectacular radiation, producing all the orders and many of the families of the now living mammals.

Furthermore, it is observed in general that the smaller the population size of a species is, the more vulnerable it will be to extinction.

Therefore, it came as a terrible shock to the Victorian age when Darwin, following his theory of common descent, incorporated the human species into the animal kingdom as a descendant of primate ancestors.