Page 178 - The Religion Of The Ignorant

THE RELIGION OF THE IGNORANT

Natural selection can do nothing until favourable individual differences
or variations occur. 7

Lamarck's Impact
So, how could these "favorable variations" occur? Darwin tried to
answer this question from the standpoint of the primitive understand-
ing 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 gen-
eration. 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 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 1930s. Neo-Darwinism added mutations, 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 vari-
ations" in addition to natural mutation.
Today, the model that Darwinists espouse, despite their own
awareness of its scientific invalidity, is neo-Darwinism. The theory

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