A Quote by Ernst Mayr

A species consists of a group of populations which replace each other geographically or ecologically and of which the neighboring ones integrate or hybridise wherever they are in contact or which are potentially capable of doing so (with one or more of the populations) in those cases where contact is prevented by geographical or ecological barriers.
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.
The second principle of magic: things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.
I think that my main criticism in that book was directed at the general assumption that adaptation characterizes populations and species, rather than simply the individuals in the populations and species.
I know that lack of contact creates more lack of contact, and contact creates more contact, or at least an ability to talk to with each other.
For me it is the direct contact of artist to material which is original, and it is the earth and his contact to it which will free him of the artificiality of the present and his dependence on industrial products.
The immune system has evolved the capacity to react specifically with a very large number of foreign molecules with which it had no previous contact while avoiding reactivity for autologous molecules, naturally antigenic in other species or in other individuals of the same species.
Human populations that do not have contact with the psychedelic tremendum are neurotic because they are male ego dominated.
Education, which was at first made universal in order that all might be able to read and write, has been found capable of serving quite other purposes. By instilling nonsense it unifies populations and generates collective enthusiasm.
Quantitative work shows clearly that natural selection is a reality, and that, among other things, it selects Mendelian genes, which are known to be distributed at random through wild populations, and to follow the laws of chance in their distribution to offspring. In other words, they are an agency producing variation of the kind which Darwin postulated as the raw material on which selection acts.
Survivor species tend to have huge populations, so they can afford to lose many individuals and still survive as a species. They also tend to be small. If you're small, you need less food - which is great in a situation where famine is everywhere.
Trimming consists of clipping off little bits here and there from those observations which differ most in excess from the mean, and in sticking them onto those which are too small; a species of 'equitable adjustment,' as a radical would term it, which cannot be admitted in science.
But the greatest obstacle of all to the successful prosecution of a new branch of industry in a country, in which it was before unknown, consists . . . in the bounties, premiums, and other aids which are granted, in a variety of cases, by the nations, in which the establishments to be imitated are previously introduced.
Each of these [bacterial] species are masterpieces of evolution. Each has persisted for thousands to millions of years. Each is exquisitely adapted to the environment in which it lives, interlocked with other species to form ecosystems upon which our own lives depend in ways we have not begun even to imagine.
I think there was certainly contact between the Trump campaign and Russians, which is perfectly normal. All campaigns in the modern age have contact with representatives of foreign governments.
Men in general are too material and do not make enough human contacts. If we search for the fundamentals which actually motivate us we will find that they come under four headings: love, money, adventure and religion. It is to some of them that we always owe that big urge which pushes us onward. Men who crush these impulses and settle down to everyday routine are bound to sink into mediocrity. No man is a complete unit of himself; he needs the contact, the stimulus and the driving power which is generated by his contact with other men, their ideas, and constantly changing scenes.
Men educate each other in reason by contact or collision, and keep each other sane by the very conflict of their separate hobbies. Society as a whole is the deadly enemy of the particular crotchet of each, and solitude is almost the only condition in which the acorn of conceit can grow to the oak of perfect self-delusion.
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