Jeffrey H. Schwartz - Sudden origins (1999)

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More than one hundred years ago, William Bateson suggested that studying the regulation and timing of development was the key to understanding evolutionary change. He was right.

Jeffrey H. Schwartz
A micromutation can produce what Goldschmidt would have described as macromutation leading to macroevolution. Since mutations in homeobox genes are inherited in the same way that earlier fruit-fly population geneticists understood the inheritance of the alleles for wing lenght or bristle number, we can appreciate that evolutionarily significant novelty—which, in turn, could result in the emergence of a new species—can be passed on from parent to child as easily and simply as eye color.

Jeffrey H. Schwartz
The often heated and sometimes nasty debates that have taken place between gradualists and punctuationists, or between micromutationists and macromutationists, have been generated by the perception that there is only one evolutionary question, for which... there can be only one correct answer.... But if we take a different approach, and assume that both sides of a typical evolutionary debate have something valid to offer, then the theoretical and methodological disagreements between different schools of thought may just be a matter of having the right answer to a different question.

Jeffrey H. Schwartz
As was demonstrated as long ago as the 1930s by the German experimental geneticist Hans Grüneberg, neither structural reduction or loss, nor structural addition, is a completely gradual process. Instead, the loss or gain of a structure is developmentally constrained to be more step-wise, or saltational.

Jeffrey H. Schwartz
The observation of reduction in complexity in many groups or organisms after a structure has emerged in a full-blown state makes sense in terms of homeobox genes.

Jeffrey H. Schwartz
If Walter Garstang's suggestion is correct, and chordates did arise from a tunicate-like form by retaining the chordate features of their larval stage of development into adulthood, then the first chordates must have been affected by a regulatory mutation that kept the Manx gene activated for a longer period of time.

Jeffrey H. Schwartz
The sudden appearance of novelty is not, as Otto Schindewolf emphasized, an unusual aspect of the fossil record.

Jeffrey H. Schwartz