Monthly Archives: October 2014

A particularly zealous reader may recall that in my recent piece on the fossil record I raised a question, in passing: “…as an exercise, can you say what in Neodarwinian theory precludes a cyclical, rather than linear and branching, evolutionary process?” Despite claims like Koonin’s (2009) that there is no tendency to greater complexity in evolution, the most basic finding of palaeontology is the overall trajectory from simple (if that word means anything in biology) single celled organisms to, well, humans, or at least higher life-forms. Whether one calls it progress or not, what is undeniable is that it is a trajectory, or rather a branching series of trajectories, which … Continue reading →

I’ve not written much about genetically modified organisms in the nearly four years The Hump of the Camel has been in existence. This is partly because, for several years until recently, it was a non-issue in Britain, having been put on the back-burner by public outcry. And it’s partly because, although I’ve been disquieted about its risks myself, a number of benevolent and wise people have supported it.

I’ve returned more than once (including in song) to the theme of tetrapod pentadactyly, because it opens up structuralist and other non-Darwinian aspects of evolution to consideration. A close runner up for my interest is the case of the giraffe (no song on that, so far), because it was an icon of Lamarckian evolution that became an icon of Darwinian evolution – before both tales were shown to be mere folk-tales by the actual study of giraffes: the long neck cannot possibly be explained by access to high sources of food, either by Darwinian selection or Lamarckian acquisition.