- Series:Animals, God’s Design, Transcript English
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.”
Evolutionary ideas about how the giraffe got a long neck are often similar to Rudyard Kipling’s Just So stories – like the one about the elephant getting a long nose. But there are versions that the professional evolutionist will disavow. The popular notion is that each generation of giraffe stretches to higher and higher leaves, so that its offspring have progressively longer necks. This popular notion does not explain why the giraffe’s necks should stop growing, and, in any case, the whole concept is disavowed by professional evolutionists on the grounds that it does not describe Darwinian evolution, but rather a pre-Darwin Lamarkian-style evolution.
A Darwinian model would suggest that a mutation led to some offspring having longer necks, and that, because they had access to better food sources, natural selection resulted in these longer-necked animals surviving. But few, if any, evolutionists would suggest that the present length of neck was achieved in one generation. This leads to problems about how each of the seven neck vertebrae lengthened and developed their characteristic ball-and-socket joints which other mammals do not have. Consequently, one recent science article suggested that the animal from which giraffes evolved already had an elongated neck. But this merely puts the problem further back without addressing it.
The giraffe’s neck operates perfectly. It is far more scientific to suggest that it did not develop from shorter necks at all but that God designed it to do just what it does.
Prayer: We praise You for Your marvelous design in nature and how You care about the creatures You made. Thank You that Your word reminds us that You care even more about us. Amen.
Author: Paul F. Taylor
Ref: Danowitz Melinda, Vasilyev Aleksandr, Kortlandt Victoria and Solounias Nikos, Fossil evidence and stages of elongation of the Giraffa camelopardalis neck, 2R. Soc. Open sci. < http://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.150393 >, accessed 9/28/2019. Image: Taken by Muhammad Mahdi Karim, GNU Free Document License 1.2.
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