Why did I keep hitching myself to dreams as big as that Montana sky? I was like Rooster Jim's chickens, with no way to fly that high.
In his anti-Darwinian book. . . (and eponymously named The Neck of the Giraffe ), Francis Hitching tells the story. . . "The need to survive by reaching ever higher for food is, like so many Darwinian explanations of its kind, little more than a post hoc speculation. " Hitching is quite correct, but he rebuts a fairy story that Darwin was far too smart to tell - even though the tale later entered our high school texts as a "classic case" nonetheless.
The past is only a guidepost. . . not a hitching post.