Page:Anton Pannekoek - Marxism and Darwinism - tr. Nathan Weiser (1912).pdf/12

12 which they ate, their necks were stretched so that a short-necked animal developed to the long-necked giraffe. To many this explanation was incredible and it could not account for the fact that the frog should have such a green color which served him as a good protecting color.

To solve the same question, Darwin turned to another line of experience. The animal breeder and the gardener are able to raise artificially new races and varieties. When a gardener wants to raise from a certain plant a variety having large blossoms, all he has to do is to kill before maturity all those plants having small blossoms and preserve those having large ones. If he repeats this for a few years in succession, the blossoms will be ever larger, because each new generation resembles its predecessor, and our gardener, having always picked out the largest of the large for the purpose of propagation, succeeds in raising a plant with very large blossoms. Through such action, done sometimes deliberately and sometimes accidentally, people have raised a great number of races of our domesticated animals which differ from their original form much more than the wild kinds differ from each other.

If we should ask an animal-breeder to raise a long-necked animal from a short-necked one, it would not appear to him an impossibility. All he would have to do would be to choose those having partly longer necks, have them inter-bred, kill the young ones having narrow necks and again have the long-necked inter-breed. If he repeated this at every new generation the result would be that the neck would ever become longer and we would get an animal resembling the giraffe.