The core idea of Darwinism is that nature doesn’t look ahead—it doesn’t anticipate what may be needed for survival. Instead, any trends, such as the changing shapes of beaks or the progressive growth of the length of a giraffe’s neck, follow from environmental selection pressures that act over long periods of time to amplify useful traits. “There is grandeur in this view of life,” Darwin would write more than twenty years later, “with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of
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