Page 155 - Once Upon a Time There Was Darwinism

All 20th-century attempts to breed animals and produce
hybrid plants have revealed limits that can never be crossed
in the processes of natural variation. One of the most famous

names in this field is Luther Burbank, who believed that there
is a hidden law in species that limits their variation:
I know from my experience that I can develop a plum half an
inch long or one two and a half inches long, with every possi-
ble length in between, but I am willing to admit that it is hope-
less to try to get a plum the size of a small pea, or one as big as
a grapefruit. . . In short, there are limits to the development
possible, and these limits follow a law. . . Experiments carried
on extensively have given us scientific proof of what we had
already guessed by observation; namely that plants and ani-
mals all tend to revert, in successive generations, toward a
given mean or average. . . In short, there is undoubtedly a pull
toward the mean which keeps all living things within some
more or less fixed limitations. 103
Today, artificial means can make a few genetic changes
in the biological structure of animals and agricultural prod- Harun Yahya (Adnan Oktar)
ucts. Stronger horses and bigger cabbages can be produced.
But Darwin clearly drew the wrong deductions from these in-

stances. Loren Eisley, one of the world's most prominent an-
thropologists, explains:
It would appear that careful domestic breeding, whatever it
may do to improve the quality of race horses or cabbages, is
not actually in itself the road to the endless biological devia-
tion which is evolution. There is great irony in this situation,
for more than almost any other single factor, domestic breed-
ing has been used as an argument for . . . evolution. 104

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