Page 330 - The Danger of a Communist Kurdistan

Lamarck's Impact

So, how could these "favorable variations" occur? Darwin tried to
answer this question from the standpoint of the primitive understan-
ding of science at that time. According to the French biologist Chevali-

er 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 Spe-
cies, for instance, he said that some bears going into water to find food
transformed themselves into whales over time. 64
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 tra-
its were passed on to subsequent generations. 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 mutations, which are
distortions formed in the genes of living beings due to such external
factors as radiation or replication errors, as the "cause of favorable
variations" in addition to natural mutation.
Today, the model that Darwinists espouse, despite their own awa-

reness of its scientific invalidity, is neo-Darwinism. The theory mainta-
ins that millions of living beings formed as a result of a process whe-

328 The Danger of a Communist Kurdistan