There are a number of attributes of species and populations that are not of any particular selective advantage to any single individual in a population but that are of great advantage to the population as a whole. Ernst Mayr More Quotes by Ernst Mayr More Quotes From Ernst Mayr 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. Ernst Mayr gapsfossilsfacts The reduced variability of small populations is not always due to accidental gene loss, but sometimes to the fact that the entire population was started by a single pair or by a single fertilized female. These 'founders' of the population carried with them only a very small proportion of the variability of the parent population. This 'founder' principle sometimes explains even the uniformity of rather large populations, particularly if they are well isolated and near the borders of the range of the species. Ernst Mayr parentlossscience The issue, as correctly emphasized by Carl Sagan, is the probability of the evolution of high intelligence and an electronic civilization on an inhabited world. Once we have life (and almost surely it will be very different from life on Earth), what is the probability of its developing a lineage with high intelligence? On Earth, among millions of lineages of organisms and perhaps 50 billion speciation events, only one led to high intelligence; this makes me believe in its utter improbability. Ernst Mayr issuescivilizationbelieve All I claimed was that when a drastic change occurs, it occurs in a relatively small and isolated population. Ernst Mayr smallisolatedpopulationchange I did not claim that speciation occurs only in founder populations. Ernst Mayr founderclaimdidonly 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 potentialgivemakeextinction
