Page 113 - What the Qur'an Says about Liars and Their Methods

The Deception of Evolution
tried to answer this question from the standpoint of the primi-
tive understanding of science at that time. According to the
French biologist Chevalier de Lamarck (1744-1829), who lived
before Darwin, living creatures passed on the traits they ac-
quired during their lifetime to the next generation. He asserted
that these traits, which accumulated from one generation to
another, caused new species to be formed. For instance, he
claimed that giraffes evolved from antelopes; as they struggled
to eat the leaves of high trees, their necks were extended from
generation to generation.
Darwin also gave similar examples. In his book The Origin of
Species, for instance, he said that some bears going into water
to find food transformed themselves into whales over time. 69
However, the laws of inheritance discovered by Gregor
Mendel (1822-84) and verified by the science of genetics, which
flourished in the twentieth century, utterly demolished the leg-
end that acquired traits were passed on to subsequent genera-
tions. Thus, natural selection fell out of favor as an
evolutionary mechanism.

NEO-DARWINISM AND MUTATIONS

In order to find a solution, Darwinists advanced the "Modern
Synthetic Theory," or as it is more commonly known, Neo-
Darwinism, at the end of the 1930's. Neo-Darwinism added mu-
tations, which are distortions formed in the genes of living beings
due to such external factors as radiation or replication errors, as
the "cause of favorable variations" in addition to natural muta-
tion.
Today, the model that stands for evolution in the world is
Neo-Darwinism. The theory maintains that millions of living be-
ings formed as a result of a process whereby numerous complex
111