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Concept
Mutationism
Summary
Mutationism is one of several alternatives to evolution by natural selection that have existed both before and after the publication of Charles Darwin's 1859 book On the Origin of Species. In the theory, mutation was the source of novelty, creating new forms and new species, potentially instantaneously, in sudden jumps. This was envisaged as driving evolution, which was thought to be limited by the supply of mutations.
Before Darwin, biologists commonly believed in saltationism, the possibility of large evolutionary jumps, including immediate speciation. For example, in 1822 Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire argued that species could be formed by sudden transformations, or what would later be called macromutation. Darwin opposed saltation, insisting on gradualism in evolution as geology's uniformitarianism. In 1864, Albert von Kölliker revived Geoffroy's theory. In 1901 the geneticist Hugo de Vries gave the name "mutation" to seemingly new forms that suddenly arose in his experiments on the evening primrose Oenothera lamarckiana. In the first decade of the 20th century, mutationism, or as de Vries named it mutationstheorie, became a rival to Darwinism supported for a while by geneticists including William Bateson, Thomas Hunt Morgan, and Reginald Punnett.
Understanding of mutationism is clouded by the mid-20th century portrayal of the early mutationists by supporters of the modern synthesis as opponents of Darwinian evolution and rivals of the biometrics school who argued that selection operated on continuous variation. In this portrayal, mutationism was defeated by a synthesis of genetics and natural selection that supposedly started later, around 1918, with work by the mathematician Ronald Fisher. However, the alignment of Mendelian genetics and natural selection began as early as 1902 with a paper by Udny Yule, and built up with theoretical and experimental work in Europe and America. Despite the controversy, the early mutationists had by 1918 already accepted natural selection and explained continuous variation as the result of multiple genes acting on the same characteristic, such as height.
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