Ernst Mayr - The species in nature (114/150)

To listen to more of Ernst Meyer’s stories, go to the playlist:    • Ernst Mayr - Early life and education (1/150)   US-German biologist Ernst Mayr (1904-2005) was a leader in evolutionary biology, gaining a PhD at 21. In his seminal work 'Systematics and Origin of the Species' considered as one of his greatest works, he integrated the theories of Darwin and Mendel. [Listener: Walter J Bock; date recorded: 1997] TRANSCRIPT: There was one other point that I emphasized in the… in the new volume and that is that this claim, and I had said this already earlier, this claim that the species are unimportant in nature, they're just an accident of nature, is quite wrong. In fact the species is the real unit of evolution. Every species occupies a certain niche in nature, a certain… place in the whole machinery of life and of ecotypes and… ecosystems and so forth, and every new species is an experiment, so to speak, of evolution. Most of them are unsuccessful, die out rather quickly, but every once in a while a species discovers a new unused resource in nature, a new unused adaptive zone, and then can be successful there and speciate again there within this new environment. And in order to have evolutionary change and evolutionary so-called progress, a abundant production of new species is a necessity just like abundant genetic variation within a population is a necessity for natural selection to work.