American evolutionary biologist Douglas J. Futuyma notes that since 1970, two very different alternatives to Darwinian gradualism have been proposed, both by Stephen Jay Gould: mutationism, and punctuated equilibria. Gould's macromutation theory gave a nod to his predecessor with an envisaged "Goldschmidt break" between evolution within a species and speciation. His advocacy of Goldschmidt was attacked with "highly unflattering comments" by Brian Charlesworth and Alan Templeton. Futuyma concludes, following other biologists reviewing the field such as K.Sterelny and A. Minelli, that essentially all the claims of evolution driven by large mutations could be explained within the Darwinian evolutionary synthesis. James A. Shapiro's claim that molecular genetics undermines Darwinism has been described as mutationism and an extreme view by the zoologist Andy Gardner. Historiography Biologists at the start of the 20th century broadly agreed that evolution occurred, but felt that the mechanisms suggested by Darwin, including natural selection, would be ineffective. Large mutations looked likely to drive evolution quickly, and avoided the difficulty which had rightly worried Darwin, namely that blending inheritance would average out any small favourable changes. Further, large saltatory mutation, able to create species in a single step, offered a ready explanation of why the fossil record should contain large discontinuities and times of rapid change. These discoveries were often framed by supporters of the mid-20th century modern synthesis, such as Julian Huxley and Ernst Mayr, as a controversy between the early geneticists—the "Mendelians"—including Bateson, Johannsen, de Vries, Morgan, and Punnett, who advocated Mendelism and mutation, and were understood as opponents of Darwin's original gradualist view, and the biometricians such as Pearson and Weldon, who opposed Mendelism and were more faithful to Darwin. In this version, little progress was made during the eclipse of Darwinism, and the debate between mutationist geneticists such as de Vries and biometricians such as Pearson ended with the victory of the modern synthesis between about 1918 and 1950. According to this account, the new population genetics of the 1940s demonstrated the explanatory power of natural selection, while mutationism, alongside other non-Darwinian approaches such as orthogenesis and structuralism, was essentially abandoned. This view became dominant in the second half of the 20th century, and was accepted by both biologists and historians. A more recent view, advocated by the historians Arlin Stoltzfus and Kele Cable, is that Bateson, de Vries, Morgan and Punnett had by 1918 formed a synthesis of Mendelism and mutationism. The understanding