A Species Is A Reproductive Community Of

I Have The Honesty To Say I'm An Atheist. There Is Nothing That Supports The Idea Of A Personal God.

In Those Early Years In New York When I Was A Stranger In A Big City, It Was The Companionship And Later Friendship Which I Was Offered In The Linnean Society That Was The Most Important Thing In My Life.

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.

It Seems To Me That For Darwin The Pulsing Of Evolutionary Rates Was A Strictly Vertical Phenomenon.

Evolution, Thus, Is Merely Contingent On Certain Processes Articulated By Darwin: Variation And Selection. No Longer Is A Fixed Object Transformed, As In Transformational Evolution, But An Entirely New Start Is, So To Speak, Made In Every Generation.