Mutation and evolution

Tag: gradualism

  • Why size matters: Saltationism, creativity, and the reign of the DiNOs

    Debates on “gradualism” in evolutionary biology address the size distribution of evolutionary changes.  The classical Darwinian position, better described as “infinitesimalism”, holds that evolutionary change is smooth in the sense of being composed of an abundance of infinitesimals (not one infinitesimal at a time, but a blending flow of infinitesimals).  …

  • Mutationism Myth (5): The Restoration

    This is the 5th in a series of 2010 blogs entitled “The Mutationism Myth” (a more scholarly version of this material ended being published in J. Hist. Biol. by Stoltzfus and Cable, 2014) The Mutationism Myth, part 5. The Restoration In the Mutationism Myth (see part 1), the Modern Synthesis (MS) rescues evolutionary biology from the…

  • The Mutationism Myth (4): Mendelian Heterodoxies

    This is the 4th in a series of 2010 blogs entitled “The Mutationism Myth” (a more scholarly version of this material ended being published in J. Hist. Biol. by Stoltzfus and Cable, 2014) In this oft-told story (see part 1), the discovery of genetics in 1900 leads to rejection of Darwin’s theory and the rise of “mutationism”,…