The Giraffe as Artwork

German biologist Wolf-Ekkehard Lnnig studied mutations for over twenty years at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne. Based on that research, he wrote a two-part, 130-page scientific work, The Evolution of the Long-Necked Giraffe, that looks in great detail at the physiology, behavior, and natural history of giraffes.

When I first read it several years ago, one sentence in this technical treatise especially captured my attention. Lnnig analyzes many Darwinian atte...