Page 132 - The Struggle Against the Religion of Irreligion

evolved from antelopes; as they struggled to eat the leaves of tall

trees, their necks lengthened from generation to generation.

Darwin also gave similar examples, and in his book The Origin of

Species said, for example, that some bears going into the water to find

food over time transformed themselves into whales. 135 However, the

laws of inheritance discovered by Mendel and verified by the science of

genetics that flourished in the 20th century utterly demolished the

legend that acquired traits could be passed on to subsequent

generations. Thus, natural selection fell out of favor as an

evolutionary mechanism.

Neo-Darwinism and Mutations

Looking for 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 external factors

such as radiation or replication errors, as a cause of "favorable

variations" in addition to natural mutation.

Today, the model that stands for evolution in the world is Neo-

Darwinism. It maintains that millions of living beings present on the

134 The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, p. 127.

130