In his chapter in the 1909 anthology Darwin and Modern Science, the British geneticist William Bateson wryly described how this widespread assumption prevented evolutionary biologists from confronting the real difficulty of explaining the origin of complex adaptations: By suggesting that the steps through which an adaptive mechanism arises are indefinite and insensible, all further trouble is spared. While it could be said that species arise by an insensible and imperceptible process of variation, there was clearly no use in tiring ourselves by trying to perceive that process. This
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