Saltationism
noun
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
Noun
- 1 The belief that evolution operates by the sudden development of new species or biological features from one generation to the next. uncountable
"Gould has misled himself by his own rhetorical emphasis on the purely poetic or literary resemblance between punctuationism, on the one hand, and true saltationism on the other."
Example
More examples"Gould has misled himself by his own rhetorical emphasis on the purely poetic or literary resemblance between punctuationism, on the one hand, and true saltationism on the other."
Etymology
From saltation + -ism.
More for "saltationism"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.