Page 308 - The Miracle in the Cell Membrane

The Miracle in the Cell Membrane

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 gen-
eration.
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. 104
However, the laws of inheritance discovered by
Gregor Mendel (1822-84) and verified by the science of
genetics, which flourished in the twentieth century, utter-
ly demolished the legend that acquired traits were
passed on to subsequent generations. Thus, natural selec-
tion 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 awareness of its scientif-