We frequently use words like “choice” to speak about things like evolutionary dynamics because they make the talk more interesting. It’s a deliberate misuse of the phrase in some ways, but it implies that natural selection ended up canalizing snakes into a specific evolutionary pathway - one instead of many possible others - based on innumerable factors but all being by definition locally (in time and place) more or less favorable.

I appreciate the input and thank you for the clarification for readers - although I don’t imagine many people thought there was some Ur-snake who said “fuck these legs.”

For the record, I am an evolutionary biologist.