Page 230 - A Historical Lie: The Stone Age

A HISTORICAL LIE: THE STONE AGE

Lamarck's Impact
So, how could these "favorable variations" occur? Darwin tried
to answer this question from the standpoint of the primitive unders-
tanding 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 accumula-
ted from one generation to another, caused new species to be for-
med. For instance, he claimed that 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. 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. 90
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 selec-
tion 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 mutations, which are
distortions formed in the genes of living
beings due to such external factors as radi-
ation or replication errors, as the "cause of
Gregor Mendel

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