Collaborating with the Royal Veterinary College, Dugan recruited a team of experts including the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (the author of The God Delusion) who, says Dugan, got “terribly excited” by the prospect of dissecting a giraffe. Its anatomy is key in proving evolution over intelligent design (the belief that the complexity of living things demonstrates the existence of a creator). Rather than passing a few inches directly between the larynx and the brain, the giraffe’s recurrent laryngeal nerve (which stimulates the voice box) takes a huge detour up and down the neck. This, says Dawkins, is not the work of Intelligent Design: “A designer can go back to the drawing board and come back with something more sensible. Evolution can’t. Evolution has no foresight.”