Science Quote by Ernst Mayr

Mayr is picking a fight with the complacent arithmetic of “more is faster.” In the mid-century evolutionary mainstream, it was tempting to treat big populations as evolutionary engines: more individuals, more mutations, more raw material for selection. Mayr’s “major novelty” is to flip that intuition and relocate evolutionary drama to the margins - to small founder populations, the scrappy offshoots that splinter off, get isolated, and suddenly live under different rules.

The intent is partly empirical, partly strategic. Empirically, founder populations can experience genetic drift, bottlenecks, and intense selection in unfamiliar environments; changes can sweep through quickly because there are fewer genomes to “convince.” Strategically, Mayr is defending a specific way of explaining speciation, especially in geographically fragmented settings (his wheelhouse as a systematist and biogeographer). He’s arguing that evolutionary history isn’t written only by the dominant, stable majority; it’s often rewritten by accidents of dispersal and isolation.

The subtext is disciplinary: “Most geneticists” reads less like a neutral citation than a corrective aimed at lab-centered population genetics that leaned on models of large, well-mixed populations. Mayr is insisting that field naturalists’ messy realities - islands, peripheries, founder events - should drive theory, not just tidy equations.

Context matters: this is the Modern Synthesis era, when evolutionary biology was negotiating whose evidence counts. Mayr’s claim doesn’t just propose a mechanism; it reallocates prestige, making the small and contingent the real accelerants of evolutionary change.