What is so amazing about the Giraffe?
The 25 pound giraffe heart is probably the most powerful in the animal kingdom! Bristol Foster commented in National Geographic on the giraffe’s heart: “To drive blood eight feet up the 500 pound neck to the head, the heart is exceptionally large and thick-muscled, and the blood pressure—twice or three times that of man—is probably the highest in any animal.” But the brain is a very delicate structure which cannot stand high blood pressure. The elevated pressure on the brain should cause the giraffe to faint when he bends down to take a drink? Does he ‘blow his mind’? Fortunately, three design features were included in the giraffe to control this and related problems.
1. First, the giraffe was designed to know that it must spread his front legs apart in order to drink comfortably. This lowers the level of the heart somewhat and so reduces the difference in height from the heart to the head of the drinking animal. This results in excess pressure in the brain being less than if the legs were kept straight.
2. Second, the giraffe’s jugular vein was designed with a series of one-way check valves which immediately close when the head is lowered, preventing blood from flowing back down into the brain. But what of the blood flow through the carotid artery from the heart to the brain?
3. A third design feature is the ‘wonder net’, a spongy tissue filled with numerous small blood vessels located near the base of the giraffe brain. The arterial blood first flows through this net of vessels before it reaches the brain. When the giraffe stoops to drink, the wonder net controls the blood flow so that the full pressure is not exerted on the brain.
Equally amazing is the fact the blood does not pool in the legs. This is prevented by an extremely tough skin and an inner fascia. This skin combination has been studied extensively by NASA scientists in their development of gravity-suits for astronauts.
How can this be?
If the giraffe evolved, along with developing a longer neck, it had to generate a huge heart to push blood up the neck, special valves to maintain its blood pressure, and an anti-gravity suit to resist the extreme pressure that is routinely produced. Did these structures come about merely by coincidence?
Wolf-Ekkehard Lonning wrote in March of 06” “No data from giraffes then (in Darwin’s time) existed to support one theory of causes over another, and none exist now. The spotty evidence gives no insight into how the long-necked giraffe species arose.”
The most likely conclusion must obviously lead away from evolution. The giraffe’s amazing abilities are a testament to design in the animal kingdom. From its long neck to its anti-gravity-suit skin, the giraffe’s diverse nature defies the theory of evolution, and embraces the opposite concept—design. When design is evident then the obvious conclusion is THERE MUST BE A DESIGNER. It takes far more faith to believe in evolution than it does to believe in God as designer and creator of our amazing world.
