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jor evolutionary transformations must was so inconsistent that it was swiftly
have occurred in single large steps, like a abandoned.
reptile laying an egg from which a bird But due to the lack of any transitio-
hatched. 213 As you see, some evolutio- nal forms in the fossil record, the Har-
nists believe that a perfectly formed but vard University paleontologists Stephen
totally different species can hatch out of Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge were aga-
any viable egg! in obliged to resuscitate the idea to acco-
Of course, the sudden emergence of unt for that situation. Gould’s famous ar-
different living groups in the fossil record ticle “Return of the Hopeful Monsters”
showed that living species did come into was an expression of this obligatory abo-
being with no evolutionary process be- ut-face. 216
hind them. 214 Naturally, this was a sour- Although they did not repeat Schin-
ce of major concern for evolutionists. dewolf’s theory to the letter, Gould and
The “Hopeful Monster” theory was Eldredge sought to come up with a mec-
put forward in the 1930s by hanism for sudden evolutio-
the European paleontologist nary leaps in order to endow
Otto Schindewolf, who pro- the theory with a scientific
posed that living things gloss. (See Punctuated evolu-
evolved not with the accu- tion myth, the.) In the years
mulation of small mutations that followed, Gould and El-
over time, as neo-Darwi- dredge’s theory was adopted
nism maintained, but by by some other paleontologists,
sudden and very large ones. who duly fleshed out its bones.
(See Macro-Mutation de- In fact, however, that the the-
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ception, the.) In citing J Julian Huxley y ory of punctuated evolution
examples for his theory, was based on even greater in-
Schindewolf claimed that the first bird consistencies and contradictions than the
had emerged from a reptile egg by way of neo-Darwinist theory of evolution.
a gross mutation—by some enormous,
random change in its genetic structu-
re. 215 Huxley, Julian
According to his theory, some land In his 1958 book Religion without
animals may have turned into giant wha- Revelation, the zoologist Julian Huxley,
les through sudden and wide-ranging one of the architects of neo-Darwinism,
changes. Schindewolf’s fantastical the- described it not as a scientific theory, but
ory was adopted and supported in the as a ideological dogma. (See Neo-Dar-
1940s by the Berkeley University gene- winism.)
ticist Richard Goldschmidt, although it
Harun Yahya (Adnan Oktar)