Page 114 - The Alliance of the Good

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THE ALLIANCE OF THE GOOD

Lamarck's Impact

So, how could these "favourable variations" occur?
Darwin tried to answer this question from the standpoint of

the primitive understanding of science in his age. According
to the French biologist Lamarck, who lived before Darwin,
living creatures passed on the traits they acquired during
their lifetime to the next generation and these traits,
accumulating from one generation to another, caused new
species to be formed. For instance, according to Lamarck,
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, and in his book The
Origin of Species, for instance, said that some bears going into
water to find food transformed themselves into whales over
time. 24
However, the laws of inheritance discovered by Mendel
and verified by the science of genetics that flourished in the
20th century, utterly demolished the legend that acquired

traits were passed on to subsequent generations. Thus,
natural selection fell out of favour 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 mutations, which are distortions formed
in the genes of living beings because of external factors such