Saltation (biology) - History

History

Prior to Charles Darwin most evolutionary scientists had been saltationists. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was a gradualist and similar to other scientists of the period had written that saltational evolution was possible. Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire endorsed a theory of saltational evolution that "monstrosities could become the founding fathers (or mothers) of new species by instantaneous transition from one form to the next." Geoffroy wrote that environmental pressures could produce sudden transformations to establish new species instantaneously. In 1864 Albert von Kölliker revived Geoffroy's theory that evolution proceeds by large steps, under the name of heterogenesis.

With the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859 Charles Darwin had denied saltational evolution by writing that evolutionary transformation always proceeds gradually and never in jumps. Darwin insisted on slow accumlation of small steps in evolution and wrote "natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight successive favourable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modification; it can act only by very short steps".

From 1860 to 1880 saltation had a minority interest but by 1890 had become a major interest to scientists. This was because in the late 19th century due to discoveries in genetics, a mechanism of saltation was proposed as large mutations. It was seen as a much faster alternative to the Darwinian concept of a gradual process of small random variations being acted on by natural selection. It was popular with early geneticists such as Hugo de Vries, who along with Carl Correns helped rediscover Gregor Mendel's laws of inheritance in 1900, William Bateson, a British zoologist who switched to genetics, and early in his career Thomas Hunt Morgan. Some of these geneticists developed it into the mutation theory of evolution. There was also a debate over accounts of the evolution of mimicry and if they could be explained by gradualism or saltation. The geneticist Reginald Punnett supported a saltational theory in his book Mimicry in Butterflies (1915).

The mutation theory of evolution held that species went through periods of rapid mutation, possibly as a result of environmental stress, that could produce multiple mutations, and in some cases completely new species, in a single generation. This mutationist view of evolution was later replaced by the reconciliation of Mendelian genetics with natural selection into a gradualistic framework for the neo-Darwinian synthesis.It was the emergence of population thinking in evolution which forced many scientists to adopt gradualism in the early 20th century. According to Ernst Mayr, it wasn't until the development of population genetics in the neo-Darwinian synthesis in the 1940's that demonstrated the explanatory power of natural selection that saltational views of evolution were largely abandoned.

Saltation was originally denied by the "modern synthesis" school of neo-Darwinism which favoured gradual evolution but has since been accepted due to recent evidence in evolutionary biology (see the current status section).

There are some prominent proponents of saltation, including Carl Woese. Woese, and colleagues, suggested that the absence of RNA signature continuum between domains of bacteria, archaea, and eukarya constitutes a primary indication that the three primary organismal lineages materialized via one or more major evolutionary saltations from some universal ancestral state involving dramatic change in cellular organization that was significant early in the evolution of life, but in complex organisms gave way to the generally accepted Darwinian mechanisms.