How would you know if you didn’t?
I would not be able to freely choose among options and no one would expect me to have any responsibility for my actions.
I don’t know where you got this, but it wasn’t the theory of evolution.
I fully realize that the best way to deflect critcism from evolutionary theory is to claim that any previous evolutionary claims which are refuted by facts and common sense “were never really part of evolutionary theory at all”.
That works very well because that way evolutionary theory can never been seen to be false. The great thing about evolutionary theory is that there can be no amount of contradictory evidence or falsification brought against it that an active imagination cannot fix.
It’s interesting also that you’ve never heard that particular evolutionary myth about giraffes before. Perhaps you never encountered the idea. It can be found in a book entitled, “The Origin of the Species” written by a evolutionist:
The giraffe, by its lofty stature, much elongated neck, fore-legs, head and tongue, has its whole frame beautifully adapted for browsing on the higher branches of trees. It can thus obtain food beyond the reach of the other Ungulata or hoofed animals inhabiting the same country; and this must be a great advantage to it during dearths… So under nature with the nascent giraffe the individuals which were the highest browsers, and were able during dearth to reach even an inch or two above the others, will often have been preserved; for they will have roamed over the whole country in search of food… Those individuals which had some one part or several parts of their bodies rather more elongated than usual, would generally have survived. These will have intercrossed and left offspring, either inheriting the same bodily peculiarities, or with a tendency to vary again in the same manner; whilst the individuals, less favoured in the same respects will have been the most liable to perish… By this process long-continued, which exactly corresponds with what I have called unconscious selection by man, combined no doubt in a most important manner with the inherited effects of the increased use of parts, it seems to me almost certain that an ordinary hoofed quadruped might be converted into a giraffe. (Darwin 1872, pp. 177ff.)
It’s pretty simple. An ordinary quadruped is converted into a giraffe.
Perhaps you missed the reference to giraffe evolution in your high school biology textbook. Or, perhaps you never had a biology textbook.
Stephen J. Gould decided to survey high school textbooks and found this:
I made a survey of all major high-school textbooks in biology. Every single one—no exceptions—began its chapter on evolution by … presenting Darwin’s theory of natural selection as a preferable alternative.
All texts then use the same example to illustrate Darwinian superiority—the
giraffe’s neck … We therefore prefer the Darwinian alternative, consistent with the
Mendelian nature of heredity, that giraffes with fortuitously longer necks (in a varying
population with a large range of neck lengths among individuals) will tend to leave
more surviving offspring that inherit their genetic propensity for greater height. This
slow process, continued for countless generations, can lead to a steady increase in
neck length,
so long as local environments continue to favor animals with greater reach
for those succulent topmost leaves.
bill.srnr.arizona.edu/classes/182/Giraffe/Tallest%20Tale.pdf
So, there is Gould saying that Darwin’s explanation of the genetic mutations in the giraffe’s neck, permitting it to have more surviving offspring because it could reach higher branches, is the preferrable evolutionary explanation (preferrable to the other “more certain than gravity” version of evolution that said that giraffes stretched their necks and transmitted that behavior to offspring".
Both the Lamarkian and Darwinian views on the evolution of the giraffes neck have been proven false since there was no survival advantage to eating leaves at the top of trees.
Now I realize that evolutionists will deny that this has any meaning at all, and even if it did, it’s not a part of evolutionary theory, never was, and even though it was published in every highschool textbooks, that really didn’t mean anything either.
We could look also at Darwinian explanations for the so-called evolution of something like the relationship between the blue-streak cleaner wrasse and predatory fish that allow it to enter their mouths and clean parasites out – and then swim out unscathed.
The Darwinian claims (for which there is zero evidence) would be that step by step simultaneous mutations occurred in both fish - allowing one to enter the mouth of the predator and the other to not eat the helper fish.
The Lamarkian view at least would claim that the learned behavior was transmitted to offspring – even though that notion was proven false also.
