Page 95 - The Struggle of the Messengers

Harun Yahya (Adnan Oktar) 93

Natural selection can do nothing until favourable individual
differences or variations occur. 7

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 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 legend that acquired
traits 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