Okay, so, when Darwin was first posing his theory of evolution, there was already a running theory, called saltation. We know now that most evolution proceeds through gradual adaption, but in order for speciation to happen, for species to divert so far from each other that they could no longer be called the same thing, it often takes serious - what we call punctuated - mutation. We were looking into the idea that early developmental changes could lead to rapid morphogenesis--i.e. adaptions occurring at a genetic level as DNA itself forms and replicates, and that the pattern of adaption occurred in such a reliable way that it could replicate itself apparently spontaneously across the population.
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