Victor B. Scheffer

Victor B. Scheffer: a biologist in the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and first chairman (1973 - 76) of the U. S. Marine Mammal Commission. His other books include award-winning The Year of the Whale, A Voice for Wildlife, and Glimpses of Evolution.

I should like . . . to make crystal clear that adaptation in its evolutionary sense applies to species (populations) and not to individuals. Spires of Form, 1983.

 

Evolution means change in the genetic makeup of populations. It means speciation. Ibid.

 

You and I are descended in an unbroken line from First Life. We are part of a continuum stretching through time and space. Ibid.

 

. . . no young monarch (butterfly) can conceivably learn from its elders, and yet year after year monarchs travel from the United States and Canada to the same wintering places in central Mexico, and even to the same trees. Ibid.

 

Birds knew the shape of the world before Magellan . . . before Columbus . . . before Man. Ibid.

 

A tabulation of sex ratios at birth or hatching for eighteen species of mammals and ten species of birds shows averages of: mammals, 51.4 percent males and 48.6 percent females; birds, 51.5 percent males and 48.5 percent females. Ibid.

 

The simplest living organism is as "successful" as the most complex. Ibid.

 

To study evolution is to study the very architecture of life itself. Ibid.

 

Although Nature needs thousands or millions of years to create a species, man needs only a few dozen years to destroy one. Ibid.

 

Far removed from other beasts by our culture, we now hear only fitfully the animal voices of our ancestors, We hear only faintly what zoologist David Barash calls "the whisperings within." Ibid.

 

(The word) "Conservation" had been coined during the administration of Theodore Roosevelt (1901&endash;09) by a forester, Gifford Pinchot. The Shaping of Environmentalism in America, 1991.

 

(The word) "Ecology" had been coined even earlier. Ernst Haeckel, biologist and philosopher, introduced it in his book, General Morphology of Organisms (1866). Its use gradually spread through botany, zoology, entomology, oceanography, limnology, and other life sciences. Ibid.

 

The heavenly body which first we must make livable is the one beneath our feet. Ibid.