Page 122 - The Solution To Secret Sorrows

THE SOLUTION TO SECRET SORROWS

Therefore, the mechanism of natural selection has no evolution-
ary power. Darwin was also aware of this fact and had to state this in
his book The Origin of Species:
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 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 se-
lection 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 muta-
tions, which are distortions formed in the genes of living beings due
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