Page 467 - Pleasant Words from the Gospe

Harun Yahya (Adnan Oktar)

that time. According to the French biologist Chevalier de
Lamarck (1744-1829), who lived before Darwin, living crea-
tures passed on the traits they acquired during their lifetime to

the next generation. He asserted that these traits, which accu-
mulated 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. 8
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 evolution-
ary mechanism.

Neo-Darwinism and Mutations

In order to find a solution, Darwinists advanced the "Mod-
ern Synthetic Theory," or as it is more commonly known, Neo-
Darwinism, at the end of the 1930s. Neo-Darwinism added mu-
tations, which are distortions formed in the genes of living be-
ings due to such external factors as radiation or replication er-
rors, as the "cause of favorable variations" in addition to natur-
al mutation.
Today, the model that Darwinists espouse, despite their
own awareness of its scientific invalidity, is neo-Darwinism.
The theory maintains that millions of living beings formed as a

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