The Earth's Shifting Crust by Charles Hapgood - wire of information

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EARTH'S SHIFTING CRUST
may, indeed, arise because one factor is still missing: a factor
which, when added, will bring the others into proper focus.
2. The Problem of Time
While no biologists since Darwin's time have questioned the
basic fact of evolution, numerous difficulties have developed
with natural selection. In the first place, while Darwin could
present evidence of changes produced in varieties of plants
and animals by artificial selective breeding, he was not able
to show how, even under artificial conditions, such changes
could lead to the establishment of new species. Recently,
some progress may have been made in solving this problem,
but by the end of the nineteenth century, Darwin's explanation
of the mechanism of evolution had been largely aban-
doned. Natural selection had come to be considered, by
many biologists, as chiefly a negative factor, capable of eliminating
unadapted variations but not of producing new
species.
Around the turn of the century the attention of evolution-
ists was turned to mutation, the sudden change in hereditary
characteristics produced by an alteration of the basic genetic
factors, genes and chromosomes. One of the early mutation-
ists, Hugo de Vries, believed that a large-scale mutation
might produce a new kind of plant or animal in a single
step (115:96). Many evolutionists then adopted mutation,
and gave up natural selection as the explanation of evolution.
This did not, however, end the controversy. A neo-Dar-
winian school, clinging to natural selection, raised damaging
objections to the theory of evolution through massive mutations.
They insisted, for one thing, that different plants or
animals differed by a great many minor traits, rather than
by a few major ones. This would mean that a great many
mutations would be required, and that these mutations
would have to take place in the same individual, or in the
same line of descent. The fact that mutation is apparently