Page 118 - Character Types of the Unbelievers

CHARACTER-TYPES OF THE UNBELIEVERS
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 accumu-
lated from one generation to another, caused new species to be
formed. For instance, he claimed that giraffes evolved from an-
telopes; 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 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 due
to such external factors as radiation or replication errors, as the

“cause of favorable variations” in addition to natural mutation.

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