Page 82 - Unawareness: A Sly Threat

80 UNAWARENESS: A SLY THREAT

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
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 evo-
lutionary 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 repli-
cation errors, as the "cause of favorable variations" in addition
to natural mutation.
Today, the model that stands for evolution in the world is