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Richard Dawkins demonstrates laryngeal nerve of the giraffe

MysOxen · 612.6K views · 2010-06-14 · 4:04

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Overview

A clip from Channel 4's Inside Nature's Giants in which Richard Dawkins shows the recurrent laryngeal nerve of the giraffe during a dissection. The nerve takes a long detour down the neck and back up.

On Hacker News

HN uses it as the canonical example that evolution is not optimal and can get stuck in local maxima.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2012–2024

Topics

Evolution & geneticsAnimals & nature
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giraffelaryngeal nerveevolutionrichard dawkinsanatomy

What people said

ufo · 2024-09 · Recommendation

The blog post recommended the TV show "inside nature's giants", and I second it. The bit about the recurrent laryngeal nerve of the giraffe is particulary memorable: [VIDEO]

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fhoffa · 2017-03 · Reference

Good catch. It seems like an artifact of working and editing a query until they got what they wanted - certainly not a BigQuery restriction. (like this [VIDEO] ) Note that the published query scans 2.25 TB of data. While impressive, for a better workflow and cost management I would split it into a 2 step process: - First extract all the files I'm interested in to a separate table (all pom.xmls?). - Then run whatever analysis you want over those files.

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adevine · 2016-01 · Reference

Evolution most certainly DOES get stuck in local maxima: [VIDEO] . Also, it's quite easy for me to imagine an animal like an angel, with arms and wings. Tetrapods only have 4 limbs to work with though. For bats to gain wings they had to lose their front legs.

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Sources

Video by MysOxen, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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