Page 86 - Justice and Compassion in the Qur'an

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JUSTICE AND COMPASSION IN THE QUR'AN

Natural selection can do nothing until favourable individual
differences or variations occur. 57

Lamarck's Impact
So, how could these "favourable 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. 58
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