Everything in biology ultimately boils down to food and sex. To survive as an individual you need food. To survive as a species you need sex.
Not surprisingly then, the age-old question of why giraffes have long necks has centered around food and sex. After debating this question for the past 150 years, biologists still cannot agree on which of these two factors was the most important in the evolution of the giraffe’s neck. In the past three years, my colleagues and I have been trying to get to the bottom of this question.
In the 19th century, biologists Charles Darwin and Jean Baptiste Lamarck both speculated that giraffes’ long necks helped them reach acacia leaves high up in the trees, though they likely weren’t observing actual giraffe behavior when they came up with this theory. Several decades later, when scientists started observing giraffes in Africa, a group of biologists ...
