Page 190 - Solution, the values of the Qurʼan

188 SOLUTION THE VALUES OF THE QUR'AN

Natural selection can do nothing until favourable
individual differences or variations occur. 30

Lamarck’s Impact
So, how could these "favorable variations"
occur? Darwin tried to answer this question from the
standpoint of the primitive understanding 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
Lamarck
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.1 3
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 selection fell out of favor
as an evolutionary mechanism.

Lamarck believed that giraffes evolved from animals
resembling antelopes. In his view, these creatures’
necks grew as they stretched up to eat the leaves on
trees, and they gradually turned into giraffes. The
laws of inheritance discovered by Mendel in 1865
proved that it was impossible for characteristics
acquired during the course of life to be handed on to
later generations. Thus Lamarck’s just-so story was
consigned to the wastebasket of history.