Life is simply the reification of the process of living.

On Earth, among millions of lineages or organisms and perhaps 50 billion speciation events, only one led to high intelligence ; this makes me believe its utter improbablity.

Wherever we look at the living biota … discontinuities are overwhelmingly frequent…The discontinuities are even more striking in the fossil record. New species usually appear in the fossil record suddenly, not connected with their ancestors by a series of intermediates.

Isolating mechanisms are biological properties of individuals that prevent the interbreeding of populations that are actually or potentially sympatric.

Every politician, clergyman, educator, or physician, in short, anyone dealing with human individuals, is bound to make grave mistakes if he ignores these two great truths of population zoology: (1) no two individuals are alike, and (2) both environment and genetic endowment make a contribution to nearly every trait.

The major novelty of my theory was its claim that the most rapid evolutionary change does not occur in widespread, populous species, as claimed by Most geneticists, but in small founder populations.

It seems to me that for Darwin the pulsing of evolutionary rates was a strictly vertical phenomenon.