I wrote yesterday about the bomb tossed by mathematicians into the evolutionary biologists' playground. Clearly the theory needed reworking but there was no question of it being abandoned. Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard University proposed a mechanism whereby a series of discontinuous transitions occurred in the genes regulating embryonic development. This would lead to the development of profound differences in adult forms. The difficulty is that Gould's theory is speculative and lacks corroborative evidence; it also represents a form of saltationism that is anathema to hard-line Darwinists.
The reality is that there is an a priori assumption of the factuality of naturalistic evolution. It constitutes the foundational working premise of modern biology. It is axiomatic and therefore unquestioned because it is beyond (or beneath, since it is foundational) question. If evolution requires macromutations they must be possible even if we haven't yet figured out a mechanism for them. On the other hand, if macromutations are impossible, then evolution doesn't require them because it obviously happened without them.
Indeed, who needs evidence when the theory flexes so accommodatingly?
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