Page 139 - The Signs Leading to Faith

The Deception Of Evolution
137

tive understanding 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 ac-

quired during their lifetime to the next generation. He asserted
that these traits, which accumulated from one generation to an-
other, 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. 52
However, the laws of inheritance discovered by Gregor
Mendel (1822-1884) 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 evo-
lutionary 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 mutations, which are distortions formed in the genes of
living beings due to such external factors as radiation or repli-

cation errors, as the "cause of favorable variations" in addition
to natural mutation.
Today, the model that stands for evolution in the world is
Neo-Darwinism. The theory maintains that millions of living