Abstract
Before and after the publication of Origins of Species, creationists have held a diversity of opinion regarding the origin of species. Studies of species in the sixteenth century began with numerous suggestions of wide variability, but after Francesco Redi helped to falsify spontaneous generation, scholars began to view species as essentially fixed. This was reinforced by prominent natural theologians, who endorsed a static creation. Despite the popularity of fixity, even Linnaeus himself doubted it. After Darwin, many Christians instinctively defended the fixist definition of creationist that Darwin himself popularized in Origin. Only in the early twentieth century did creationists return actively to developing models of limited speciation or polyphyletic evolution. The independent recurrence of these ideas suggests that they have some intrinsic appeal to those seeking an alternative to monophyletic evolution.