Page 253 - Living in Accordance with the Qur'an

Adnan Oktar (Harun Yahya) 251

LAMARCK’S FALLACY

So, how could these “favorable variations” occur? Darwin tried
to answer this question from the standpoint of the primitive under-
standing of science at that time. According to the French biologist
Chevalier de Lamarck (1744-1829), who lived before Darwin, living
creatures passed on the traits they acquired during their lifetime to
the next generation. He asserted that these traits, which accumulated
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. (Charles Darwin,
The Origin of Species: A Facsimile of the First Edition, Harvard University
Press, 1964, p. 184.)
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 legend that acquired
traits were passed on to subsequent generations. Thus, natural selec-
tion was left ‘alone’ and consequently rendered completely ineffec-
tive 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-Darwin-
ism, at the end of the 1930s. Neo-Darwinism added mutations, which
are distortions formed in the genes of living beings due to such exter-
nal factors as radiation or replication errors, as the “cause of favor-
able variations” in addition to natural selection.