Recent work from deep imaging [15, 14, 10, 2, 3, 13] and spectroscopic [17, 7, 18, 11] surveys has shown that much of the rapidly evolving faint blue galaxy population [5, 16, 17] is comprised of morphologically peculiar galaxies. These systems may be luminous counterparts to local irregular galaxies, tidally disturbed systems, or perhaps members of entirely new classes of objects with no local counterpart. Another possibility is that these morphologically peculiar systems are simply ``ordinary'' galaxies whose strange appearance is simply a result of their being observed in the rest-frame ultraviolet (a ``morphological K-correction''), where we know little about the appearance of the galaxy population. This distinction between intrinsic and apparent peculiar galaxies lies at the heart of this meeting. In this article several lines of evidence are reviewed which suggest that the bulk of the morphological peculiarities seen in distant galaxies are intrinsic to these systems, and not simply the product of rest-frame bandshifting. In the final section of this article preliminary results from a new line of evidence are presented, focussing on the ``chain galaxy'' population as a case study.