Large Gray and Wrinkly - Creation Moments

Genesis 1:25
“And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.”

The old joke goes: “What’s gray and has a trunk? A mouse on vacation.” Of course, we know that this is really the description of the world’s favorite animal, the elephant.

In another Creation Moment, I described Rudyard Kipling’s Just So story about the Elephant Child. But the evolutionary account of how the elephant got its trunk is not really more rational. A look at articles on Wikipedia about the evolution of the elephant reveals that they do not want to discuss the evolutionary appearance of the trunk. But the BBC was not so reticent. On their science pages, they maintain that the evolution of the trunk was essential so that the elephant could get enough food into its mouth to maintain its large size. One biological “law” suggests that the mouth and skull volumes alone are not as large as would be expected on the basis of how much elephants eat. Therefore, the trunk is necessary to get the food into the mouth faster.

There are significant problems with simple evolutionary explanations like this. Does the elephant have a trunk because of its large size? In which case, why did the large trunkless elephant not die out? Or did it develop a trunk first, which caused subsequent generations to grow larger? If so, what was the supposed evolutionary advantage of that first trunk if the animal was not large? As we frequently observe, evolution is supposed to proceed one step at a time, not two! We would observe that these features of an elephant are exactly what we would expect since they are designed by God.

Prayer: Along with the hymnwriter, we praise You that The Lord God Made Them All, including All Creatures Great and Small. Amen.

Ref: Why the Elephant Has a Long Trunk, < http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150217-why-the-elephant-has-a-long-trunk >, accessed October 26^th 2017. Image: Muhammad Mahdi Karim, GNU Free Document License 1.2.