Abstract
THE mode of evolution in the giraffe has been a favourite subject for discussion, Darwin1 wrote “… it has been supposed that all the parts must have been simultaneously modified; and it has been argued that, on the principle of natural selection, this is scarcely possible … but it cannot be denied that an animal might have its neck, or head, or tongue, or forelimbs elongated a very little without any corresponding modification in other parts of the body”, Graham Cannon2, very properly I consider., rejects this, concluding: “It is this idea of co-ordinated variation that is, to my mind, the central core of the whole problem of evolution”
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References
Darwin, C., The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, second ed., 206 (John Murray, 1893).
Cannon, H. Graham, The Evolution of Living Things, 112 (Manchester Univ. Press, 1958).
Himmelfarb, Gertrude, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, 278 (Chatto and Windus, 1959).
Schreider, E., Nature, 165, 286 (1950).
Darwin, C., The Origin of Species, 166 (John Murray, 1910).
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BROWNLEE, A. Evolution of the Giraffe. Nature 200, 1022 (1963). https://doi.org/10.1038/2001022a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/2001022a0
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