The giraffe is one of the world's most amazing creatures. Children and adults alike will stand mesmerized just looking at it for long periods of time.
The giraffe has many features that could not have evolved according to the theory of evolution, namely in small incremental steps over many generations. It must have been designed by a supernatural intelligence and come into existence with all of its parts functioning.
Male giraffes can stand up to 18' tall and their necks alone can be almost 8' long. [1] However, they have the same number of vertebrae in their necks as humans, seven. A large male averages 2,600 pounds but can weigh over 4,200 pounds, almost a small pickup truck. The head and neck on an adult giraffe will weigh over 550 pounds. [2]
Think of the engineering skills it takes to create a crane that can lift over 550 pounds and swing it around. You have to know what you are doing. Evolutionists make up a story, without any evidence to back it up, that somehow the long neck elongated by stretching for higher and higher food. Others think the long neck grew because of natural selection and survival of the fittest. The bones in its neck grew longer by mutations and the giraffes with the longer necks were able to survive better because they could reach more food, a competitive advantage. They seem to ignore other facts like it's harder to get a drink and get blood to the brain. It's also harder to breathe and swallow your food. It takes really long nerves to reach from the brain to all parts of the body. As the neck gets longer, all kinds of other mutations would have also had to be necessary simultaneously in order to support the head way up that high.
Evolutionary scientists are always disagreeing with each other. Some research even concluded that longer necks is a disadvantage because they die more in droughts and have a more difficult time getting enough nutrition. [3]
Being tall may help you get more food, especially with a 21 inch tongue [4], but it also reveals your location to any predators in the area.
One of the problems for the giraffe to "evolve" is how to get blood up to the brain 18' off the ground. It takes a lot of pressure to push a full neck's worth of blood up to the brain. You also have to be sure that it doesn't slide back down in between pumps of the heart. The giraffe's heart is 2 feet long and weighs 25 pounds. The giraffe has a relatively small heart and its power comes from a very strong beat as a result of the incredibly thick walls of the left ventricle. The left ventricle that pushes out the blood has a relatively small capacity, but it pumps 170 times a minute (humans are 80) and creates a blood pressure twice that of humans.[5][6] The heart pumps almost 16 gallons per minute. It takes special arteries to do this and withstand the pressure.
The giraffe also has to have unique veins so that load of blood in the brain and neck doesn't gush down the hill and into the body and heart.
Now think about when the giraffe bends down to take a drink of water. And it's a big drink of up to 12 gallons. [7] It's legs are six feet long and the mouth can't reach the water without first spreading his legs. But when his head is down, the giraffe has just the opposite problem with his blood. The blood is now rushing to his head really fast. If the heart keeps pushing with the same pressure, it will blow his brains out. Now his arteries have to slow the blood from going down to his brain too fast. But his veins also have to do the opposite from before and help the blood go uphill. So the blood has to flow downhill 8 to 10 feet and then back uphill another 8 to 10 feet back to his heart. That takes some really specialized systems.
Are you following so far? OK, the giraffe is bent over drinking with his front legs spread apart. Suddenly a lion shows up to eat him. He'll have to raise his head from the ground level up to 18 feet really, really fast and start running. If he's slow, he dies and doesn't reproduce. But what happens to his blood when he suddenly raises his head 18 feet in the air. It stays behind. Mostly likely he passes out and gets eaten by the lion. There is no second chance in nature. You get it right the first time or you don't survive.
Scientists don't really know how all this works. You can read about them putting giraffes to sleep with drugs and trying to simulate these situations and see what's going on. [8]
Here's another issue for the rest of his body since the giraffe has really high blood pressure. All of his arteries and veins need to be adapted for this, especially the arteries and veins in his legs which are 6 feet long. The blood vessels especially in his feet would be under a lot of fluid pressure to burst. Scientists say that the skin on his legs is really tight to prevent pressure building up in his feet. [9]
Baby giraffes take 14 months in the womb so it takes a long time between generations for any supposed mutation and natural selection to work out. Babies weigh up to 150 pounds and are 6 feet tall when they are born. Mothers give birth standing up, which means the baby falls 6 feet when it is born. That's another little ability that baby giraffes have to be born with the first time. Otherwise they would die and it would take at least 14 months before another baby would be born that might make it.
These are just a few of the special characteristics of the giraffe that all have to come together simultaneously for them to even exist. If only some but not all of the systems are in place, then the giraffe likely dies.
To say every living thing came about via mindless random processes requires a faith that far exceeds belief in a Supreme Creator. As the renown British physicist Lord Kelvin once wrote: "Overwhelming strong proofs of intelligent and benevolent design lie around us ... The atheistic idea is so nonsensical that I cannot put it into words." [10]
God made the giraffe. He made it for you and me and our children to stare at in wonder and amazement. He made it as a gift for us.
There is a God and He shows us His love for us in all the things around us.
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[1] The Big Zoo (November, 2004) http://www.thebigzoo.com/Animals/Reticulated_Giraffe.asp
[2] http://www.buzzle.com/articles/giraffe-facts.html
[3] a 2010 study found that adult giraffes with longer necks actually suffered higher mortality rates under drought conditions than their shorter-necked counterparts. This study suggests that maintaining a longer neck requires more nutrients, which puts longer-necked giraffes at risk during a food shortage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giraffe
[4] http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/giraffe/
[5] M Smerup, J Funder, E Sloth, S Buus, C AAlkjaer, T Wang, E Brondum, NH Secher, P Bie, M Damkjaer, H Nygaard, MF Bertelsen, C Grondahl, G Candy, JM Hasenkam. “How can a normal-sized heart generate high blood pressure in the giraffe?”
[6] They have the highest recorded blood pressure. 280/180mm Hg on average. http://www.buzzle.com/articles/giraffe-facts.html
[7] http://www.buzzle.com/articles/giraffe-facts.html
[8] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19657096
[9] http://www.giraffeconservation.org/giraffe_facts.php?pgid=2
[10] Lord Kelvin, Victoria Institute, Journal, No. 124, p. 267
Have you ever seen pictures of paintings that were done on the walls of ancient caves? Here you can see an example.
Those markings on the walls have been there for thousands and thousands of years. Who could know how they really got there? People can only take educated guesses, right?
Many people assert with absolute certainty that cavemen painted those formations on the walls. But just maybe the similarity to men or animals is just totally accidental. Maybe we can come up with some explanation about rain water carrying different colored minerals swept into the caves by water so we don't have to assume humans did it. How do we know for sure that intelligent beings created those formations?
Scientists must be using some criteria in order to decide with certainty that those supposed drawings were made by intelligent beings.
Now I'm going to show you a series of pairs of pictures. Of each pair I want you to choose which one of the two most definitely had an intelligent creator and which picture is of something that came to exist totally by accident WITHOUT any intelligence involved.
If you said that the being pictured in the second one of each pair had NO intelligent creator, then you would be in agreement with the evolutionists and the atheists, the ones who think they are so smart. They believe that horses came to exist accidentally, but that paintings of horses could only originate from an intelligence like a human being. Etc., etc.
Come on!!! It's patently obvious to me that everything in the pictures above show signs of an intelligent designer. The beings in the second pictures required an intelligence thousands or millions of times greater than the ones who painted the caveman drawings.
A person can deny the obvious for as long and as loud as they want, but they can't change the truth.
There has to be God.
The concept of “irreducible complexity” was put forth by Dr. Michael Behe, a biochemist, in his book, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. [1]
The concept is a strong argument against Darwinian Evolution and in favor of an invisible designer. Remember Darwin’s evolution was all about lots of small incremental changes over time and many generations. Darwin even said the following:
"If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. …But I can find out no such case." --Charles Darwin [2]
Years ago before modern equipment like the electron microscope scientists believed that a single cell was basically just a blob of protoplasm, not complicated at all. This is the “black box” that Behe refers to. They did not know what was going on inside. Nowadays, we know for a fact that the tiniest of living bacteria cells is very, very, very complicated.
"Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10^-12 grams, each is in effect a veritable microminiaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world." [3]
If a system is “irreducibly complex”, this simply means that you cannot take away any single piece at all because if you do, it won’t work. Behe uses the example of the mousetrap to try to illustrate his point. It has only five parts, but if you took away any one of them, it would not work.
"If any one of the components of the mousetrap (the base, hammer, spring, catch, or holding bar) is removed, then the trap does not function. In other words, the simple little mousetrap has no ability to trap a mouse until several separate parts are all assembled. Because the mousetrap is necessarily composed of several parts, it is irreducibly complex. Thus, irreducibly complex systems exist." [4]
In his book, Behe gives a few examples, but the one that I like is the flagellum (tail) of a tiny bacteria. Behe has studied those for 20 years. The tail allows it to swim around. The tail works a lot like a machine, an outboard motor on a boat. Behe says there are 40 different proteins that are needed for the flagellum and they have to be assembled in the correct order and sequence. One mistake or one missing piece and it won’t work. (Watch an animation of the process on YouTube. [5]) This could never develop slowly piece by piece. All pieces must be present at the beginning and assembled in the correct order.
The big problem for evolution is that it relies on small incremental and accidental steps AND each one has to make the organism better off or it doesn’t survive by “natural selection.” It has to be BETTER adapted than its ancestor. If a tail begins to develop slowly, the early bacterium is going to have a useless tail. That’s not going to be advantageous. It’s going to be worse. Evolutionists faithfully believe that this process happens over and over again thousands of times.
Let’s take a larger scale example. Evolutionists believe that dinosaurs evolved into birds. How did that supposedly happen? Imagine you are a dinosaur on four legs and you have a baby that has two legs that start to look slightly like wings. Then this baby grows up and has a descendant down the line. In this new dinosaur, the same two legs look slightly more like wings. The process repeats itself many, many times. Each time the offspring is somehow more fit to survive. At some point in the middle of the evolution, the dinosaur must have half-leg/half-wings. How good is that going to work? Obviously, it has to be the two front legs and only the two front legs that change. Back legs changing doesn’t work. Two legs changing on the left side or right side doesn’t work. Only one leg changing doesn’t work. All this seems preposterous to me, but letting our imaginations go on a little more we eventually get to the midway point. At the halfway point you’ve got limbs that are almost worthless as legs and totally worthless as wings. You’re dead meat.
Naturally the true believers in evolution maintain their faith by using their imaginations to get around the irreducible complexity argument. Check out some of their rebuttals if you want and then follow up with the responses by Behe and others. [6]
Typically the evolutionists have no physical evidence for their imagined processes so how can you debate their faith. Secondly, their imagined processes always violate one important rule of Darwinism, namely that no directed intelligence is ever allowed at any stage of development because there cannot be God.
In the end, scientific truth will lead to proof that there must be God.
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[1] Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Black-Box-Biochemical-Challenge/dp/0743290313
[2] Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, chapter 6 (p. 189), 1859, Murray: London
[3] Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Theory-Crisis-Michael-Denton/dp/091756152X
[4] Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Black-Box-Biochemical-Challenge/dp/0743290313
[5] Animated video of growth of bacterial flagellum. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0N09BIEzDlI
[6] Responding to Darwinists claiming to have explained away the challenge of Irreducible Complexity. http://www.discovery.org/a/3408
[7] Link to article on Irreducible Complexity. http://www.ideacenter.org/stuff/contentmgr/files/9147e04fc268407ac48a8915b73ef8e2/miscdocs/irreduciblecomplexity.pdf
Most likely you have heard the term, Second Law of Thermodynamics, but may not be able to give a definition. Note that this is a scientific LAW of nature. It’s been around and verified again and again for a long, long time and there are no known violations of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, unlike the THEORY of evolution.
Thermodynamics has to do with the study of energy. The meaning of the Second Law in simple terms is that everything tends toward disorder. Energy tends to disperse. Nothing becomes more complex on its own. Everything tends to break down over time as long as nothing new is added to the system from outside.
Hot things cool down as the heat (i.e. energy) disperses. Things tend to go downhill (not uphill) to a lower energy state. Everything wears out and eventually decays. Living things all eventually die. This is the natural order of the universe.
Isaac Asimov (a highly respected evolutionist, and ardent anti-creationist) has said: “Another way of stating the second law then is: ‘The universe is constantly getting more disorderly!’ Viewed that way, we can see the second law all about us. We have to work hard to straighten a room, but left to itself it becomes a mess again very quickly and very easily. Even if we never enter it, it becomes dusty and musty. How difficult to maintain houses, and machinery, and our bodies in perfect working order: how easy to let them deteriorate. In fact, all we have to do is nothing, and everything deteriorates, collapses, breaks down, wears out, all by itself—and that is what the second law is all about.” [1]
Since everything in the universe tends toward disorder, it is a violation of the Second Law if they become more orderly and complex all by themselves.
If you leave your room one day and it’s a mess, it will stay a mess for all eternity, gradually getting messier and messier until it one day disappears. If you go away for awhile and come back and it is cleaner and more orderly, then you know your mother was there. Or at least some energy force was there with the distinctive quality of order. Energy itself would not be sufficient. There had to be the component of orderliness. Otherwise the random energy would have just added to the mess. Putting a wild bull in there would not have cleaned the room.
This is where evolutionists have a really hard time. They can say all day that there was energy coming down to the earth from the sun, but what about the orderliness which requires information and intelligent design?
If there were to exist some primordial soup of chemicals (disregarding where it came from), then for all those chemicals to somehow change into a living cell is a direct violation of the Second Law. They would not order themselves into a living organism that has gigantic numbers of orderly properties like digestion of energy sources and reproduction.
People who deny the existence of God have a huge problem with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. They usually claim that the energy of the sun qualifies as the outside source that can cause life to form accidentally. That’s a huge stretch because there is no order and information in the sun’s energy. There are many examples of the sun’s energy speeding up the process of disorder, not the other way around. It heats water to cause it to evaporate faster. It wears out the paint on your house.
They also try claim that the earth is an open system and somewhere in the universe changes are going on that balance out the increased order on the earth. That’s an extreme level of faith in a mystery greater than the mysteries in the Bible. That’s on the order of saying that I’m sitting in my room watching my computer fall apart, so somewhere else on earth a computer is being built all by itself. Except the problem is multiplied millions of times over because living beings are millions of times more complicated than a computer.
Honest evolutionists will admit that they have a problem, but nonetheless go right on having faith. They have faith even though there must have been millions upon millions of violations of the Second Law of Thermodynamics necessary to get to every new stage up the evolutionary ladder from a single living cell, to multi-celled species, to plants, to animals, up to human beings. That would take an unfathomable number of increases in order, each one a violation of the Second Law. The only honest explanation is that an unseen intelligent designer is adding energy and information.
“If Evolution is true, there must be an extremely powerful force or mechanism at work in the cosmos that can steadily defeat the powerful, ultimate tendency toward “disarrangedness” brought by the 2nd Law. If such an important force or mechanism is in existence, it would seem it should be quite obvious to all scientists. Yet, the fact is, no such force of nature has been found.” [2]
“Using natural processes alone, there’s just no explaining how the complex, information-intense organization of even single-celled life and its uniquely inherent and complex processes could have emerged from non-life in the first place, and then could continue to fly in the face of natural law with untold increases in information, complexity and organization to yield all the flora and fauna varieties known to have existed.” [3]
“Thus, unless we are willing to argue that the influx of solar energy into the Earth makes the appearance of spaceships, computers, and the Internet not extremely improbable, we have to conclude that the Second Law has in fact been violated here.” [4]
There must be a God!
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[1] ] Isaac Asimov, Smithsonian Institute Journal, June 1970] [Isaac Asimov, "In the Game of Energy and Thermodynamics You Can't Even Break Even", Smithsonian Institution Journal (June 1970), p. 6
[2] ChristianAnswers.Net http://www.christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-thermodynamics.html
[3] T. Wallace Five Major Evolutionist Misconceptions about Evolution, http://www.trueorigin.org/isakrbtl.asp
[4] Granville Sewell, "A second look at the second law", Mathematics Department, University of Texas, El Paso, Jan. 19, 2011 http://www.math.utep.edu/Faculty/sewell/AML_3497.pdf
