Page 218 - The Miracle of Migration in Animals

THE MIRACLE OF MIGRATION IN ANIMALS

nism created new species over the course of time, he suggested
the possibility of migration creating different species. But today,
even evolutionists acknowledge that natural selection has no
power to make living creatures evolve.
Natural selection adds no new information to the gene pool
of living creatures, and thus cannot provide them with new char-
acteristics. Some evolutionists also claim that the characteristics
that creatures acquire through natural selection are passed on to
the next generation. Before Darwin, the French biologist Lamarck
advanced the theory that living species evolve from one another.
In his book, Zoological Philosophy, Lamarck asserted that creatures
passed on changes they acquired in the course of their lives to fu-
ture generations. In his famous example, he claimed that giraffes
originally had much shorter necks, but with each subsequent gen-
eration, their efforts to reach tall trees made their necks grow
longer.
Lamarck’s “transfer of acquired characteristics” was invali-
dated with the discovery of the laws of heredity. In the mid-20th
century, the discovery of DNA proved that genetic information is
encoded in the nucleus of cells of living creatures and could not be
changed by “acquired characteristics.” Even if an animal’s neck
stretched by a few centimeters over the course of its life, its young
would still be born with necks of the standard dimensions. In
short, scientific findings disproved Lamarck’s theory as a false hy-
pothesis.
But to disguise the invalidity of this claim, some evolution-
ists put forward the concept of mutation. To date, however, no
useful mutation for developing genetic information has been ob-
served. Accordingly, living creatures’ “irreducibly complex”
structures invalidate the concept of “gradual accumulation of

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