The Day the Giraffe Blew His Mind

A neighbor asked me one Monday, “Well, what did you do this weekend?” My reply? “In Sunday School we blew up a giraffe brain!” There was sort of dumbfounded look on his face and then he asked me kind of slowly, “So…just where do you get a giraffe brain…and why did you blow it up?” I replied, “I teach the teen Sunday School class in our church, and I was just doing some reading about creation and evolution and I saw an article about the giraffe and what an amazingly complex animal it is.” I had to hurry my explanation as he needed to leave for an appointment. “You see the adult giraffe is about 18’ tall and its neck is about 8’ of that. Now if the giraffe is munching on some leaves at the top of a tree and then decides to take a drink of water and rapidly lowers its head, all of the blood that is pumped by its huge heart (a giraffe has 2-3 times the blood pressure of you and I) will go rushing down toward the head and literally blow the giraffe’s mind – were it not for some remarkably intricate designs. And just the opposite is true also – if the giraffe is drinking water and suddenly raises its massive neck and head the animal would almost certainly pass out as the blood would rush back down into the body – were it not for those valves and pressure sensing signals working just the opposite.” (In the article I read, Lynn Hofland, an environmental test engineer at NASA and founder of Stiffneck Ministries, explained it in more detail: “…this would be a problem [involving too high blood pressure] when the giraffe was head-down drinking water, were it not for a unique collection of reinforced artery walls, by-pass and anti-pooling valves, a web of small blood vessels and pressure-sensing signals that keep adequate blood flow to the brain at just the right pressure.” ["Giraffes: Animals that Stand Out in a Crowd" by Lynn Hofland, found on www.creationism.org]). I quickly explained to him that I wanted to somehow illustrate this to my class so I went to a local home improvement store and bought some PVC pipe, a valve, and some balloons. I put all of this together to try to show how high the blood had to pump and how hard it is to pump it that high. The teens and I had fun as a couple of them blew up a balloon fitted to the end of a 10 foot section of pipe partially raised in the air. I had a valve in it so that after they blew for a little bit, I would then close the valve so they could rest. It took awhile, but they kept blowing and blowing and finally the PVC giraffe “blew its mind.” The marvelous complexity of the sort of goofy looking animal we call the "giraffe" is truly amazing. On the Saturday night before my Sunday School class my wife and I practiced with the PVC giraffe just to make sure it would work. We attached a balloon to one end, lowered the balloon end into the bathtub and then poured water into the upper end of the pipe to fill up the balloon about half way. Then I grabbed the balloon end of the pipe and raised it quickly – the water rushed out and actually started to suck the balloon down the pipe. So if God hadn’t put those pressure sensors and by-pass valves in the giraffe’s neck, if it suddenly raised its head to take a look around, its mind would wind up a couple of feet down its neck! Talk about getting light-headed! And one final item that stood out to me in the article about the giraffe – because the skin, blood cells and capillaries were designed in such a way so as to prevent the pooling of blood in its legs, NASA studied this animal to better design antigravitational suits for the space program. Wow, is that cool! Perhaps on Judgment Day those who believed so steadfastly in evolution will be asked by Jesus, “You know, I gave you the giraffe to show you just how silly your evolutionary beliefs are.” Copyright 2008 All rights reserved