Assalamu Alaikum and Peace to non-muslims,
The person who put forward the theory of evolution the way it is defended today, was an amateur English naturalist, Charles Robert Darwin.
Darwin had never taken a formal biology education. He only took an amateur interest in the subject of nature and living things. His interest drove him to volunteer for boarding on the official discovery ship named H.M.S. Beagle that set out from England in 1832 and travelled around different regions of the world for five years. Young Darwin was greatly impressed by various living species, and particularly by various finches he saw in the Galapagos Islands. He thought that the variance in their beaks was caused by their adaptation to their habitat. With this idea in mind, he supposed that the origin of life and species lay in the concept of "adaptation to the environment". According to Darwin, living species were not created individually by Allah, but came from a common ancestor and differentiated from each other as a result of natural conditions.
Although Darwin's hypothesis was not based on any scientific discovery or experiment, in time, he turned it into a pretentious theory with the support and encouragement he received from the famous materialist biologists of his time. The idea was that the individuals who adapted to the habitat in the best way transferred their qualities to the next generations, and therefore, these advantageous qualities accumulating in time changed the individual to a species totally different from its ancestors. (The origin of these "advantageous qualities" was unknown). According to Darwin, man was the most developed outcome of this blind mechanism.
Darwin named this process "evolution by natural selection". He thought he had found the "origin of species"; the origin of one species was another species. He published these views in his book titled The Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection in 1859.
While developing his theory, Darwin was impressed by many evolutionist biologists preceding him, and primarily by Lamarck. According to Lamarck, living creatures were passing the traits they acquired during their lifetime from one generation to another, and were thus evolving. For instance, giraffes evolved from antelope-like animals by extending their necks further and further from generation to generation as they tried to reach higher and higher branches for food.
But both Darwin and Lamarck were mistaken, because biochemistry did not exist at that time and genetics was unknown. Therefore, their theories depended totally on their powers of imagination.
While the echoes of Darwin's book lingered on, an Austrian botanist, Gregor Mendel discovered the laws of inheritance in 1865. These laws refuted the idea of passing the acquired traits onto subsequent generations. Not much heard of until the end of the century, Mendel's discovery gained great importance at the beginning of the 1900's. This was the genesis of the science of genetics. Again in the same years, the structure of the genes and the chromosomes was discovered. And in the 1950's, the discovery of the DNA molecule that includes the genetic information put the theory in a great crisis. The reason was the incredible complexity of the DNA, whose origin could never be explained by any random process.
All these developments should actually have caused Darwin's theory to be banished to the dusty shelves of history. However certain circles insisted on revising, renewing, and raising the theory up to a scientific platform. All these efforts were very meaningful in indicating that behind the theory laid some ideological intentions rather than scientific concerns.
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