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DEVOTED TO ALLAH

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 gen-
eration to another, caused new species to be formed. For in-
stance, 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 demol-
ished the legend that acquired traits were passed on to sub-
sequent 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 vari-
ations" in addition to natural mutation.

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