Page 148 - Signs Of The Last Day
P. 148
Lamarck be lieved
that gi raffes evolved
from such an i mals
as an te lopes. In his
view, the necks of
these grass-eat ing
an i mals grad u al ly
grew longer, and
they even tu al ly
turned in to gi raffes.
The laws of in her it -
ance dis cov ered by
Mendel in 1865
proved that it was
im pos si ble for prop -
er ties ac quired dur -
ing life to be hand -
ed on to sub se -
quent gen er a tions.
Lamarck's gi raffe
fairy tale was thus
con signed to the
waste bin of his to ry.
Species, for instance, he said that some bears going into water to
find food transformed themselves into whales over time. 37
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 mecha-
nism.
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 muta-
tions, which are distortions formed in the genes of living beings
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