Ernst Mayr: Year

“The idea that a few people have about the gene being the target of selection is completely impractical; a gene is never visible to natural selection, and in the genotype, it is always in the context with other genes, and the interaction with those other genes make a particular gene either more favorable or less favorable. In fact, Dobzhanksy, for instance, worked quite a bit on so-called lethal chromosomes which are highly successful in one combination, and lethal in another. Therefore people like Dawkins in England who still think the gene is the target of selection are evidently wrong. In the 30s and 40s, it was widely accepted that genes were the target of selection, because that was the only way they could be made accessible to mathematics, but now we know that it is really the whole genotype of the individual, not the gene. Except for that slight revision, the basic Darwinian theory hasn't changed in the last 50 years”

Ernst Mayr

Part of the answer to the question "Where do you think Darwinism is going to go in the next 50 years?"
What evolution is: Talk with Ernst Mayr (2001)

People , Way , Mathematics , Idea

“I published that theory [of speciational evolution] in a 1954 paper…and I clearly related it to paleontology. Darwin argued that the fossil record is very incomplete because some species fossilize better than others… I noted that you are never going to find evidence of a small local populatlon that changed very rapidly in the fossil record… Gould was my course assistant at Harvard where I presented this theory again and again for three years. So he knew it thoroughly. So did Eldredge. In fact, in his 1971 paper Eldredge credited me with it. But that was lost over time.”

Ernst Mayr

Ernst Mayr (2000) " The Grand old Man of Evolution" interview by Michael Shermer and Frank Sulloway http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/mayr_interview.html, Skeptic 8 (1): 79; As cited in: Quotations Ernst Mayr on Gould http://www.stephenjaygould.org/people/mayr_quotations.html, Stephen Jay Gould Archive, 2013

Change , Time

“Having reached the rare age of 100 years, I find myself in a unique position: I'm the last survivor of the golden age of the Evolutionary Synthesis. That status encourages me to present a personal account of what I experienced in the years (1920s to the 1950s) that were so crucial in the history of evolutionary biology.”

Ernst Mayr

Ernst Mayr (2004) " 80 Years of Watching the Evolutionary Scenery http://www.sciencemag.org/content/305/5680/46.full" Science (2 July 2004) Vol. 305 no. 5680 pp. 46-47

Age , History , Personality