Giraffes and Evolutionary Just-So Stories

Believers in descent-with-modifications evolution tell a story of how the giraffe got its long neck, which has been repeated for many year. Some things are taught that even some Darwinists say are simply not true. While many examples have been given of evolutionists saying ridiculous things to bamboozle people into accepting evolution, there are also some that are willing to be upfront about the problems they have with certain claims. Giraffe evolution is one of those areas — and not just the neck, but the entire animal.

Giraffes, Unsplash / Melissa van Niekerk

Biblical creationists as well as Intelligent Design advocates like to point out that there are numerous biological details in giraffes that have to be in place or nothing works, nothing makes sense. (The okapi is related to the giraffe, and that critter also has Darwinists baffled.) They cannot explain the giraffe's neck, and its genome is also problematic for them, and other indications of specified complexity. Clinton Richard "I Don't Know What I'm Talking About" Dawkins does not set up camp with the honest folk, as seen in the link below. It's really quite simple: The giraffe, okapi, and everything else were created recently. Creation is the explanation, and evolution continues to fail.

The giraffe’s neck has long been a beloved icon of evolutionary theory. According to the story, one of the giraffe’s short-necked ancestors had a slightly longer neck, which helped him reach leaves the other animals on the savannah couldn’t. This gave him a survival advantage he passed on to his offspring. Or maybe the female giraffes really dug his slightly longer neck, giving him a reproductive advantage. Same result. He passed his slightly longer neck on to his offspring. Rinse and repeat a few thousand times, and voila, the lineage ends up with 600-pound, six-foot long giraffe necks.

But the devil is in the details. An article in the journal Nature frankly characterizes the evolution of the giraffe’s cartoonishly long neck as “a puzzle”:

To read the rest, hold your head up high and see "Evolution’s Tall Tale — The Giraffe Neck." Although it is an Intelligent Design site, the contents are quite useful. The following short video is interesting, and fun for me because I recognize the narrator as Michael, a text-to-speech voice. Yes, computer-generated voices have come a very long way.