Page 248 - Matter: The Other Name for Illusion

Natural selection can do nothing until favourable individual differences
or variations occur. 59

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. 60
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 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 theory maintains that millions of
living beings formed as a result of a process whereby numerous complex
organs of these organisms (e.g., ears, eyes, lungs, and wings) underwent
"mutations," that is, genetic disorders. Yet, there is an outright scientific fact

that totally undermines this theory: Mutations do not cause living beings to
develop; on the contrary, they are always harmful.

246 MATTER: THE OTHER NAME FOR ILLUSION