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A conceptual metaphor does for arguments what scaffolding does for buildings.

There is, in theory, nothing wrong with using an analogy in the course of arguing for natural selection. A conceptual metaphor does for an argument what scaffolding does for buildings. […]

Thus, it would be fair to say that breeding was not so much scaffolding as a cornerstone. Darwin never escaped the logic of the analogy, nor did he aim to, for he did not find it problematic. Natural selection was created in the image of artificial selection, and the former operated in the way of the latter. This analogy has haunted us ever since, provoking fantasies of natural selection as an agent endlessly optimizing species’ performance in the struggle for life.

The creators of new thought styles must have one-track minds

Darwin’s defensiveness may also have been a product of blind love. As the founder of a scientific paradigm, he was especially devoted to its vindication. Ludwig Fleck, an inspiration behind Thomas Kuhn’s development of the concept of paradigm shift, noted that creators of new thought styles must have one-track minds. Others are entitled to partake of several approaches, but the revolutionary is left to secure his or her own. For Darwin, this meant a degree of obstinacy in the face of criticism. There was no other way to make such a huge difference in the history of truth.

Never discard a genius's idea...

Never discard a genius’s idea. I uphold that although the domestication analogy is wrong, it can render great service to knowledge if, and only if, it is turned on its head. Instead of inferring natural selection from artificial selection, we should infer from emestication what nature is not. In what follows, I explore what breeders do in order to isolate how their values and activities produce results different from what occurs in nature. We will see here the true source of the eugenic and capitalistic ethics ascribed to evolution: not natural law but human hybris.

'Natural elimination' instead of 'natural selection'

Had Darwin not been under the spell of fanciers, he may have called his discovery “natural elimination” and reserved “selection” for the rare cases of fixation and stabilization of advantageous varieties. What is eliminated? The lethal and the luckless. In this alternate universe, the history of biology, and its contemporary predilections,would be vastly different. Instead of fitness, we would speak of chance. The recipe for escaping natural elimination? Take normalcy and add luck. Luck is the necessary ingredient for the good enough; often it is the sufficient one, too.

The organic law of the balancing between the volumes of organs

“…One cannot meet a body more cramped from front to back.” But he also thought to explain, in universal terms, the giraffe’s thriving in spite of such disproportionality. He credited the “organic law” of “the balancing between the volumes of organs,” whereby “asystem of organs acquires a dimension out of proportion only when other organs are restricted and reduced by an equivalent amount.” This notion of physiological trade-offs was axiomatic among scientific minds of the era and is maintained even in today’s evolutionary language. As Goethe wrote and Darwin quoted in the Origin, “The budget of Nature is fixed, but she is free to dispose of particular sums by any appropriation that may please her. In order to spend on one side, she is forced to economize on the other side.” Saint-Hillaire thought the giraffe’s disproportions a “memorable” example of this law at work.

The domestication analogy run amok

One cannot blame the giraffe for leading evolutionists astray. It did not choose its strangeness and celebrity, the qualities that made it such an inviting target for theorists’ assumptions of adaptation. Chapter 2 takes up this assumption directly. Why were Darwin and his interlocutors so certain that traits were adaptive in the first place? In some cases, such as that of the finches discussed in Chapter 3, there was good evidence. But in many other cases, all that theorists had to go on was a mistaken analogy between nature and domestication. They thought the jungle was like a farm, where a breeder called natural selection wrought ever-finer creatures from one generation to the next. This analogy ran amok, we will see, is foundational to the selectionst dogma that continues to afflict thinking about evolution and its ethical consequences.

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.

Answers tend to die young, but a good question lives forever.

The giraffe’s carreer as a scientific challenge seemed to be over. Posterity’s verdict was unanimous - Darwin was right, Lamarck was ridiculous, affair closed. After Darwinism solved the mystery of the neck, biologists lost interest in the giraffe for nearly a century. But the case was reopened when field researchers studied giraffes in Africa.The accumulating facts reveal many holes in the canonical understanding.

First, it turns out that the feeding benefits of the giraffe’s long neck materialized primarily in the minds of evolutionists whi had never seen the animal in the wild. During the dry season, giraffes tend to feed from bushes at or below shoulder height, not high up where their necks confer an advantage. Half of the time they browse at a aheight of two meters or fewer, which overlaps with the feeding zones of larger herbivores, such as the gerenuk (Litocranius walleri) and the kudu (Tragelaphus imberis and Tragelaphus strepsiceros). And if just to spite Darwinians, it is during the rainy season, when food is abundant, that giraffes are more likely to feed from higher branches.

Second, studies of the ratio of neck-to-leg length in giraffes and near relatives the okapis (Okapia johnstoni) indicate that neck length has increased 2.1 times more than expected in the giraffe. Pumping blood all that way leaves the giraffe with the highest known blood pressure of all animals, necessitating a gigantic heart and reducing capacity for other valuable organs; hence its disproportionally minuscle brain.

Finally, 2010 research of giraffe demography found that in periods of drought, the adults most likely to die are tallest and largest males. Their greater caloric needs cannot be met by the leaves available at any tree level.

All these findings suggest that the neck may not be adaptive after all. One is reminded of Coleridge’s scorn for Iago’s efforts to justify his hatred of Othello: a “motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity.”

Evolutionary biologists invert the scientific principle

In science, methodological neutrality is expreses by the null hyptothesis, namely that every relationship between phenomena is, by default, the fruit of chance. The burden of refutation weighs on the researcher. You don’t have to prove innocence of justify chance.

Evolutionary biologists invert the principle: being selected is the default state, and a chance result is the outlier. There is a presumption of selection in nature, so a biologist is exempt from proving it. Instead, the burden of the proof lies on whoever claaims that a trait or a size was not selected. The time is ripe for biologists to embrace the ways of their fellow scientists and accept the null hypothesis: chance, which is to day, neutrality. Doing so does not imply rejection of natural selection, an indefensible stance. What it does imply is the rejection of natural selection as the default state in nature.

Wenn Hunde sprechen könnten...

Karel Čapek:

Wenn Hunde sprechen könnten, dann fänden wir es vielleicht genauso schwer, mit ihnen auszukommen, wie mit anderen Leuten.