Page 112 - The School of Yusuf (as)

THE SCHOOL OF YUSUF

Lamarck's Impact

So, how could these "favorable variations" occur? Darwin tried to
answer this question from the standpoint of the primitive under-
standing 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. 45
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 selec-
tion 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 1930's. Neo-Darwinism added muta-
tions, 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 stands for evolution in the world is Neo-

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