The Fruitful Facets of Gallon's Polyhedron 429
to the theory of mutation on the other hand useless or even disadvantageous ones
may also appear" (1909a, volume 1, pp. 209-210)
- Slow Darwinian changes cannot be observed on human and experimental
time scales, but the mutation theory brings evolution into the domain of
observational science; "the origin of species may be seen as easily as any other
phenomenon" (1905, p. 26). Emphasizing a direct contrast between the virtues of
his operational theory and the fatal intractability of Darwinian gradualism (here
attributed to Wallace, for de Vries could not bear to saddle his hero with such a
negative assessment), de Vries brands gradualism as obstructionist, and
compliments his own view as liberating: "I shall try to prove that sudden mutation
is the normal way in which nature produces new species and new varieties. These
mutations are more readily accessible to observation and experiment than the slow
and gradual changes surmised by Wallace and his followers, which are entirely
beyond our present and future experience.
5 - 9B. At the apex of this phylogeny, De Vries shows the 7 mutant forms derived from
Oenothera Lamarckiana. The rest of the diagram illustrates De Vries' general view of evolution;
with most lineages stable nearly all the time, but entering short mutational episodes when several
new species may arise virtually at the same time. From Volume 2 of De Vries' Mutation Theory.