Sunday, January 20, 2008

Did the First Giraffe Have a Navel?

Intelligent Design is turning into a hot topic. Given all the efforts being made by IDers to get attention, it is surprisingly hard to find details on how their alternative to Evolution is supposed to work.

A common criticism among IDers is about the lack of fossils of "intermediate forms" between species that evolved from one another. The ID answer is that there was no intermediate form; instead the new species was created whole. An example of an allegedly missing intermediate form is a short-necked ancestor of the giraffe.

What I'm not finding any details about is exactly how, according to IDers, the first giraffe appeared. Did 2 adults (one male, one female) miraculously poof into existence a million years ago? Or was the first pair of baby giraffes born to and raised by deer? The first seems more likely if the intelligent designer was a deity, the second if it was space aliens[1].

Any links to explanations would be appreciated. Does anybody know if The Design of Life (3rd edition of the ID high school biology textbook Of Pandas and People) has an answer?

[1] "It could be space aliens," said William Dembski, a mathematician and philosopher at Baylor University in Texas and author of No Free Lunch [and later The Design of Life], a new book on intelligent design. "There are many possibilities." San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, March 17, 2002

No comments: