What these scientists hypothesize goes far beyond the realm of cannibalism and into the very mechanisms of evolution itself. Their claim is that the appearance of new traits in a population, generally regarded as a first step toward the evolution of new species, can occur by means other than the accumulation of micromutations (i.e., small-scale or highly localized mutations), the classic mechanism by which new traits, and eventually new species, are thought to appear. Some researchers now believe that given generations, novel traits originating as examples of phenotypic plasticity have the
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