uch a view.
What must we think of the ethical status of such a conscious power who
causes countless millions of creatures to come into the world and
ruthlessly compels them to battle with one another until a cruel and
tragic death ends their existence?

But that is a metaphysical matter, with which we need not concern
ourselves in this discussion; the important point is that among the
everyday happenings of life are processes that are quite competent to
account for the condition of adaptation exhibited by various animal forms.
These processes are real and natural, not imaginative or artificial, and
so they will remain even though it will become clear that much is still to
be learned about the causes of variation and the course of biological
inheritance. Darwin was the first to contend that natural selection is but
a part of nature's method of accomplishing evolution. As such it is
content to recognize variations and does not concern itself with the
origin of modifications; it accepts the obvious fact that congenital
variations are inherited, although it leaves the question as to how they
are inherited for further examination. Because the doctrine of natural
selection does not profess to answer all the questions propounded by
scientific inquisitiveness, it must not be supposed that it fails in its
immediate purpose of giving a natural explanation of how evolution may be
partly accounted for.

* * * * *

Before proceeding to the post-Darwinian investigations that have done so
much to amplify the account of natural evolution, let us consider the
contrasted explanation given by Lamarck and his followers. As we have
stated earlier, Lamarckianism is the name given to the doctrine that
modifications other than those due to congenital factors may enter into
the heritage of a species, and may add themselves to those already
combined as the peculiar characteristics of a particular species. Let us
take the giraffe and its long neck as a concrete example. The great length
of this part is obviously an adaptive character, enabling the animal to
browse upon the softer leafy shoots of shrubs and trees. The vertebral
column of the neck comprises just the same number of bones that are
present in the short-necked relatives of this form, so that we are
justified in accepting as a fact the evolution of the giraffe's long neck
by the lengthening of each one of originally shorter vertebrae. The
Lamarckian exp