Page 226 - Allah's Gentle Artistry

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Lamarck believed that giraffes evolved from
such animals as antelopes. In his view, the
necks of these grass-eating animals gradual-
ly grew longer, and they eventually turned
into giraffes. The laws of inheritance discov-
ered by Mendel in 1865 proved that it was
impossible for proper-
ties acquired during
life to be handed on
to subsequent gen-
erations. Lamarck’s
giraffe fairy tale
was thus consigned
to the wastebin of
history.

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 le-
gend 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 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 natural
mutation.