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Such a consequential weapon could never be the claim of one country alone… | blogjou

Daniel S. Milo

Good Enough - The Tolerance for Mediocrity in Nature and Society

p. 48
02 Oct 2023

Such a consequential weapon could never be the claim of one country alone...


Firs, Mivart argued that if having a long neck was so advantageous, “we ought to have seen at least several forms, similar to the giraffe, developed from different Ungulata… Being needful, there should be many animals with it.” In other words, if the long neck is adaptively beneficial, why is it not seen among related animals? Darwin retorted that there are events, in the hiotory of humanity, that occurred in one country but not in others. This seems an ungraceful pirouette. The long neck, as Darwin saw it, was not any odd event in the giraffe’s evolution but its survival edge. Such a consequential weapon could never be the exclusive claim of one country, as the nuclear arms race reminds us.