One Long Argument 
One Long Argument, Ernst Mayr, 1991.
- Who is Darwin?
- Confronting the Creationists: The First Darwinian Revolution
- How Species Originate
- Ideological opposition to Darwin’s Five Theories: Darwin’s five conceptual breakthroughs
- Struggle Against the Physicists, Philosophers, and clerics
- Darwin’s Path to the Theory of Natural Selection: How he developed Natural Selection
- What is Darwinism?
- A Hard Look at Soft Inheritance: Neo-Darwinism.
- Geneticists and Naturalists Reach A Consensus: The 2d Darwinian Revolution
- New Frontiers in Evolutionary Biology.
The family tree of the genus Homo, to which human beings belong because we descended from a common ancestor.
Because Charles Robert Darwin "raised some of the most profound questions about our origins that have ever been asked, and as a devoted and innovative scientist he provided brilliant, often world-shattering answers."
Page xiv.
Preface
"Darwin did not publish his theories about evolution for another twenty years, even though he wrote some preliminary manuscript essays in 1842 and 1844."
p. 6.
"In all the writings of the naturalists, geologists, and philosophers of the period, God played a dominant role. They saw nothing peculiar in explaining otherwise puzzling phenomena as being caused by God, and that included the question of how species originate."
p. 14-15.
After his crucial conversation with John Gould about the Galapagos mockingbirds in 1837, Darwin continued to struggle with a problem of how to define a species, but for that matter, so did virtually all other naturalists during the ensuing 150 years.
Indeed, the longer Darwin struggled with these concepts, the more he seemed to be confused."
pp. 26-27.
"To a large extent these differences of opinion are due to a failure of these students of Darwin to appreciate the complexity of his paradigm."
five concepts and the last is "natural selection"
p. 35.
"Darwin's empirical researches led to results that were in conflict with the most basic assumptions of physicalism."
p. 48.
Herschel, the law of the "higgedly-piggedly."
"natural selection is really a two step process, the first one consisting of the production of genetically different individuals (variation), while the survival and reproductive success of these individuals is determined in the second step, the actual selection process."
p. 68.
1838, natural selection,
"It was a most daring innovation, since it proposed to explain by natural causes, mechanically, all the wonderful adaptations of living nature hitherto attributed to 'design.' "
p. 70.
"Hidden likeness among differences"
T. H. Huxley,soon referred to Darwin's ideas as Darwinism (1864) and in 1889 Alfred Russel Wallace published a whole volume entitled Darwinism."
p. 90.
"new methodology"
pp. 104-105.
"Soft inheritance"
"Darwin rejected essentialism and explained adaptation in strictly variational terms," but "he sometimes fell back into typological language,"
p. 108
"Darwin's major thesis was that evolutionary change is due to the production of variation in a population and the survival and reproductive success ('selection') of some of these variants. But the origin of this variation puzzled him all his life."
p. 109.
"when we study scientific disciplines we observe great irregularities. . . .
The opposition to natural selection continued unabated for some eighty years after the publication of the Origin."
p. 132.
"most mutations had only small effects on the phenotype and were not at all like the large mutations envisaged by the early Mendelians. In this period the difference between genotype and phenotype was clarified, and it was understood that what is selected are whole genotypes, not individual genes. Therefore genetic recombination, rather than mutation was seen as the immediate source of the genetic variation available for selection."
"For the physicist one of the most important parameters of any process is its rate."
reductionist approach to adaptive responses
"Another error made by most opponents of the synthesis is a failure to differentiate between proximate and evolutionary causations. For Darwin and all of his holistic followers, selection starts at fertilization and continues through all embryonic and larval stages.
By that Mayr means proximate causes are involved in larval or embryonic changes and are not the same as long-term changes of characteristics such as dentition, proteins, or musculature in populations over many generations (evolutionary causation).
"species is the unit of action in macro evolution."
p. 144-145.
"Any scientific revolution or synthesis has to accept all black boxes for if one had to wait until all black boxes are opened, one would never have any conceptual advances."
p. 146.
"In all selection phenomena--and selection is of course an antichance process-- chance phenomena also occur simultaneously. Or, to give another example, speciation is never merely a matter of genes or chromosomes, but also of the nature and geography of the populations in which the genetic changes occur. Geography and the genetic changes of populations affect the speciation process simultaneously."
p. 147.
The actuality of evolutionary causation
- Nothing really evolves, instead some, but not all variants, survive.
- Survival is differential -- more variations exist in a population than are ever sustained and more than variety is produced than is capable of being passed on. Differential survival of variable offspring leads to alterations over generations in the reproducing population from which differences may, or may not arise. Some differences --like isolation on islands with specific food types in a species eating requirements-- can lead to varieties becoming completely distinct species.
- That is because most do not reproduce and many offspring are not healthy or hardy enough to reproduce.
- Thus everything we see around us is the latest bud on the tree of life and has descended equally from a common ancestor.
- most mutations are failures; at best ineffectual and many genotypic changes are neutral. [ Mayr, pp. 152-153].
- Those isolating mechanisms that produce distinct species from the variability of the reproducing population can and do involve genotypic and phenotypic variations and the rates of those phenotypic variations differ from .
Ernst Mayr (July 5, 1904, Kempten, Germany - February 3, 2005, Bedford, Massachusetts USA), was one of the 20th century's leading evolutionary biologists. He was a naturalist, an explorer, an ornithologist and historian of science and philosophy.
His work contributed to the conceptual revolution that led to the modern evolutionary synthesis of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolution, and to the development of the biological species concept.
Neither Darwin nor anyone else in his time knew the answer to the 'species problem' : how could different species evolve from one common ancestor. Ernst Mayr brought the solution by defining the concept 'species'. In his book 'Systematics and the Origin of Species' (1942) he wrote that a species is not a group of morphologically similar individuals, but a group that can breed only among themselves, excluding all others. When groups of identical individuals get isolated, the sub-populations will start to differ by genetic drift and natural selection over a period of time, and thereby evolve into new species.
His theory of peripatric speciation based on his work on birds is considered as one typical mode of speciation, and is the basis of the theory of punctuated equilibrium.
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Date: 19 February 2008
