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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.

I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change - led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.

The one process now going on that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.

I did not claim that speciation occurs only in founder populations.

In the last century, as we learned more about genes, we were able to devise ways of accelerating evolution.

Evolution is a bankrupt speculative philosophy, not a scientific fact.

All I claimed was that when a drastic change occurs, it occurs in a relatively small and isolated population.

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

Moreover, the concern of some that moving DNA among species would breach customary breeding barriers and have profound effects on natural evolutionary processes has substantially disappeared as the science revealed that such exchanges occur in nature.

Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.