Page 88 - Islam: The Religion of Ease

ISLAM: THE RELIGION OF EASE

LAMARCK'S IMPACT

So, how could these "favorable variations" occur? Darwin tried
to answer this question from the standpoint of the primitive un-
derstanding of science at that time. According to the French biolo-
gist 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. 8
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 leg-
end 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 muta-
tions, 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 scientific invalidity, is neo-Darwinism. The the-

86