Daily Archives: 25/10/2014

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.