Click here to see the article by Richard entitled Ban the voice-over.
I'm thrilled to rediscover my hero Dawkins joking once again about why ancestral giraffes magically developed long necks for the simple reason that they "needed" such long necks in order to reach up for leaves. I believe that many ordinary people, not familiar with evolution and genetics, would believe in that "need"... but I hope I'm mistaken.
A long-discredited alternative to Darwinism invoked ‘need’ as the driver of evolution: ancestral giraffes needed
to reach high foliage and their energetic striving to do so somehow
called longer necks into existence. But for ‘need’ to translate itself
into action, there has to be another step in the argument. The ancestral
giraffe mightily stretched its neck upwards and so the bones and
muscles lengthened and . . . well, you know the rest, O my Best Beloved.
The true Darwinian mechanism, of course, is that those individual
giraffes that succeeded in satisfying the need survived to pass on their
genetic tendency to do so.
No comments:
Post a Comment