18 Nov '18 17:47>
A friend here recently shared the following thoughts with me which I thought warranted a thread of its own. (He may appear to contribute, but won't name him in case he doesn't).
'The Neck of the Giraffe' (written by Francis Hitching) postulates that evolution of species has not and certainly has not always been a slow, gradual and incremental thing, but rather has happened in a more sudden and dramatic way. Further, the theory goes that cataclysmic geological events may have been responsible, which have caused mass extinctions, and have 'shocked' the collective gene pool into producing offspring which don't resemble their parents. The book calls these offspring 'hopeful monsters', the vast majority of which did not survive, but those that had some advantage over their contemporaries did so. The giraffe is cited as an example. There is plenty of fossil evidence for giraffe - like creatures, with short necks and short legs, and then there are giraffes, but there is no fossil evidence for intermediate giraffes. In other words it appears that long-necked giraffes appeared suddenly,
Having long legs and a long neck, our hopeful monster giraffe would have been able to reach higher branches and so on, so this characteristic came to dominate the gene pool and so the species.
It's an interesting theory, at least, and purports to explain huge gaps in the fossil record. '
'The Neck of the Giraffe' (written by Francis Hitching) postulates that evolution of species has not and certainly has not always been a slow, gradual and incremental thing, but rather has happened in a more sudden and dramatic way. Further, the theory goes that cataclysmic geological events may have been responsible, which have caused mass extinctions, and have 'shocked' the collective gene pool into producing offspring which don't resemble their parents. The book calls these offspring 'hopeful monsters', the vast majority of which did not survive, but those that had some advantage over their contemporaries did so. The giraffe is cited as an example. There is plenty of fossil evidence for giraffe - like creatures, with short necks and short legs, and then there are giraffes, but there is no fossil evidence for intermediate giraffes. In other words it appears that long-necked giraffes appeared suddenly,
Having long legs and a long neck, our hopeful monster giraffe would have been able to reach higher branches and so on, so this characteristic came to dominate the gene pool and so the species.
It's an interesting theory, at least, and purports to explain huge gaps in the fossil record. '