Page 81 - Taking the Qur'an as a Guide

The Evolution Misconception

tried to answer this question from the standpoint of the primi-
tive understanding of science in his age. According to the French
biologist Lamarck, who lived before Darwin, living creatures
passed on the traits they acquired during their lifetime to the
next generation and these traits, accumulating from one genera-
tion to another, caused new species to be formed. For instance,
according to Lamarck, giraffes evolved from antelopes; as they
struggled to eat the leaves of high trees, their necks were ex-
tended from generation to generation.
Darwin also gave similar examples, and in his book The
Origin of Species, for instance, said that some bears going into
water to find food transformed themselves into whales over
time. 9
However, the laws of inheritance discovered by Mendel and
verified by the science of genetics that flourished in the 20th
century, utterly demolished the legend that acquired traits
were passed on to subsequent generations. Thus, natural selec-
tion fell out of favour 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 1930's. Neo-Darwinism added
mutations, which are distortions formed in the genes of living
beings because of external factors such as radiation or replica-
tion errors, as the "cause of favourable 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

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