Young-Earth Creationism Leads the Short-Necked Okapi to Identify as a Giraffe

The Ark Encounter theme park in Kentucky is filled with signs and displays that promote young-earth interpretations of geology, astronomy, biology, archaeology and theology. I have critiqued many of these interpretations before (e.g. My Trip to the Ark Encounter and Depicting a Real Flood with Unrealistic Images). Today, I want to talk about one sign. A sign that explains the young-earth understanding of the origin of giraffes.

It is hard to read so here is the text from that sign:

“Why is the Giraffe’s Neck so Short?

Giraffidae is a family of large mammals currently represented by only two species. They have split hooves and re-chew their food, indicating they qualify as “clean” animals according to the dietary laws described in Leviticus.  This means that up to seven pairs of this kind may have boarded the Ark rather than just a single pair.

Today, giraffids are often considered in light of their more popular member: the long-necked giraffe. However, the other living member of the family, the okapi, has more reserved proportions. Indeed, the majority of fossil giraffids had shorter necks than the modern giraffe.  This suggests that the Ark giraffids were probably more okapi-like in appearance than the giraffe.

The long neck of the giraffe is only one example of variation within this kind. Sivatherium, with its stocky body and branched ossicones, resembled a moose, with Bramatherium had a plate of bone on its head that split into four ossicones like an elaborate headdress. Fossil giraffids have been recovered from rock layers as low as the Miocene across Asia, Africa, and Europe.” 

The question presented on the sign is appropriate because the Ark patron is likely staring at a replica of an odd giraffe-looking animal in a cage and wondering what it is.  Most visitors to the Ark Encounter would consider themselves literal six-day creationists. However, for many of them the strange menagerie of animals in cages in the ark replica will be their clearest exposure to the neocreationist’ promotion of rapid post-Flood evolution as a biblical model or the origin of modern animal forms.

The neocreationist’ current thinking on common ancestry and massive rapid speciation are summarized in the article, Reimagining Ark Animals.  Here we can see the essential elements of that view in the text of this single sign.

Principles of young-earth evolution

• Living species of land vertebrates can trace their origins back to common ancestors preserved on Noah’s Ark less than 4500 years ago.
• Living species (except humans) share common ancestors with a few to possibly hundreds of other species.
• Those common ancestors were not the same species we are familiar with today.
• Common ark ancestor changed (evolved) into these species as they adapted to new environments after the Flood.

Relating these principle to giraffes the Ark Encounter and it parent organization Answers in Genesis preach that God did not create animals with long-necks for Adam to name. Rather, the neocreationist’ understanding is that God created a giraffid animal that was more moose-like in appearance.  We are told the giraffe we know and love today did not originally have a long neck.  Rather the ancestor to that long-necked animal was preserved on Noah’s ark and then evolved into many dozens of different forms of giraffids of which the long-necked giraffe is but just one type.

Notice that the sign also emphasizes a particular feature of the fossil record of giraffids:  “Fossil giraffids have been recovered from rock layers as low as the Miocene across Asia, Africa, and Europe.”  With so little space why did the Ark Encounter creators feel this information was important to include?  It is important because it provides the rationale for their post-flood hyperspeciation model of origins.

Dr. Andrew Snelling, employee of Answers in Genesis and one of the most prominent geologists in creationism, is a strong proponent of the Flood/Post-Flood boundary (i.e. where we can find the boundary between rocks laid down during a global flood and rocks laid down by post-flood events) at the Cretaceous/Paleogene (K/Pg) boundary which conventional geologists say occurred 66 million years ago. The Miocene rocks are far younger than this boundary and thus, in Snelling’s and therefore Answers in Genesis’ estimation, are post-flood sediments.  Since this is where dozens of moose-like giraffid fossils are found then all of these short-necked thick-bodied giraffids must all have evolved from a common ancestor giraffid that left the ark prior to these fossils being preserved in post-flood sediments.

The connection of hundreds of fossil relatives of modern species to post-Flood sediments is a significant reason why neocreationists believe that hundreds of species of animals must share a common ancestor in the recent past.  In the case of giraffids, there have been dozens of species of giraffids that we place in a single “family.”  See the image from Twitter below of just a few of those.  What really sticks out is the uniqueness of the long-necked giraffe in the giraffid family.

What the young-earth literature and the Ark Encounter never tell their customers is that they have no physical evidence that any giraffid lived prior to the Flood. Every fossil of every species of giraffe ever found has been located in post-Flood deposits according to Dr. Snelling and Answers in Genesis. This bears repeating, in all of the Global Flood rocks not a single member of the YEC giraffid kind has ever been found.

Setting aside the fossil giraffids let’s focus on the two genera of living giraffids, the giraffe and the okapi.  These are clearly distinct species. Among its many differences is a large gap in chromosome number. Giraffes have 30 chromosomes whereas Okapi have 44 to 46 chromosomes.  It is not surprising that they are sexually incompatible with long-necked giraffes.  Nonetheless, the Ark Encounter signs assures the reader that the okapi is the same “kind” of animal—despite not meeting their most basic criteria for demarcating a kind—and thus God didn’t create them separately but originally as the same animal. The Ark Encounter also informs the visitor that neither the okapi nor long-necked species we recognize today was on Noah’s ark though “the Ark giraffids were probably more okapi-like in appearance than the giraffe.” 

Does this make sense? Could dozens of giraffid species have evolved from a single common ancestor in just a few hundred years?

While superficially appealing to the young-earth mindset because it solves the problem of how to fit all the present day species of animals on the ark there is nothing to support such wild speculation. This barely qualifies as a hypothesis much less a theory. For what I have called young-earth evolutionism (YEE) to be true, much of what we know about genetics, ecology, evolutionary processes and even some principles of chemistry, must be completely wrong. The YEE provides little tangible evidence or testable theories of how these tremendous changes might occur. Where is the evidence of this change? Surely there should be eyewitness reports of one species giving rise directly to another since hundreds of new species were forming every year for hundreds of years. Why are new species not forming as such incredible rates today?

How much “evolution” are we talking about if dozens of species of giraffids were derived from an ancestral pair?  Quite a lot.  I will provide one piece of data to illustrate.  I did a quick search and there is a published mitochondrial genome for the okapi and giraffe. This genome is small but can provide us with some baseline comparisons of genetic divergence among animals.

So how different are an okapi and a giraffe? Their mtDNA genomes which are both about 16,000 base pairs in size differ by almost 2100 base pairs which means they have only 87% DNA sequence similarity. How different is that? By comparison, you and any chimpanzee differ by 1400 to 1500 base pairs (nucleotides). Hence we are 92% similar to a chimpanzee with respect to our mtDNA sequences.  You can compare these numbers to other comparisons of animals that YEC believe are the same “kind” or different kinds in the post Of Kinds and Common Ancestors: mtDNA Genomes Compared.

A Nilgai antelope. “Nilgai running” by Rushil Fernandes – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nilgai_running.jpg#/media/File:Nilgai_running.jpg

I also examined the mtDNA genome of the nilgai (Boselaphus tragocamelus), which is the largest Asian antelope. Antelopes are ungulates like giraffes but are classified in a different families in the ungulate Order.  In my comparison with the okapi genome I found them to differ by just under 2200 differences (89% DNA sequence similarity). So the okapi shows similar differences in terms of its genetic code from a giraffe and this large antelope. Why doesn’t AiG then just consider all antelopes to be the same “kind” as giraffes and thus all descendants from a common ancestor on the ark? By what criteria do they make their decisions of what constitutes and kind and what does not?  While not all neocreationist are ready to go this far, some have considered the possibility that God only created a “ruminant kind” which was on the Ark and then became giraffes, elk, deer, pronghorn and several other types of animals (see: Are Ruminants Derived from a Common Ancestor: Ruminating on the meaning of a Kind).

The paradigm shift in Young-Earth Evolutionists’ understanding of species

This simple sign at the Ark Encounter underscores a significant change in the rhetoric of young-earth creationists.   It shows that Answers in Genesis is vigorously attempting to reorient the creationist’ understanding of the origins of species diversity. This goes against a long history of YECs claiming that specific adaptions to their environment in species are clear evidence of de-novo creation of those species.  The argument goes that the features that a particular species has are so specialized that no intermediate characteristics could have allowed the organisms to survive and thus they must have been formed as we see them today. It’s a form of the irreducibly complex argument championed by Intelligent Design advocate Michael Behe.

As you can imagine, if AiG is going to define species as descendants of common ancestors on the Ark then these special features of individual species must be adaptions to their current condition rather than products of special creation in the creation week. Sometime YECs will call upon some sort of pre-programming of genomes that God performed at the moment of creation on Day 6 to give them the ability to form these features later.  This is imagined to be a sort of latent capacity to live in future environments that God place in their genomes such that under just the right conditions suddenly a long neck, stronger heart and special blood vessels would suddenly appear in a select number of descendants to make a giraffe.

All one needs to do is look at a couple of example of how giraffes were used in the creationist’ literature 20 years ago to see how different this brave new world of post-flood hyper-evolution has changed the creationist’ landscape.

Here is one example from 1996:

Other mammals do desire the leaves of trees but none of them will ever become giraffes, and the giraffe most certainly did not come from any other ‘less-than-giraffe’ animal.

In this article we are further told that giraffes have features that could only be explained as God having produced giraffes as we see them today.  These author here does not seem like they believe that giraffes came from a short-necked moose-like creature.

Below is another example from a blog post written in 2010 of the same sort of argument that is common in the YEC literature:

Everyone agrees, creationists and evolutionists—a giraffe is a giraffe. It is a distinct species, a discrete entity. No one would say a giraffe is a “missing link” or a “transitional form.” A giraffe is not some creature emerging from some other creature or changing into a “higher” or more complex animal—a giraffe is a giraffe! It can be scientifically examined with results that display the necessity of a single creative act. This long-necked creature had to have been originally formed with all of its complex features fully functional.

The common view is that features are so specialized in species that they could not have come to be through any intermediate. But one species becoming another requires intermediate steps. If the animals on the ark did not look like today’s animals they have changed and they have new specializations that give them the attributes as species that they are today.

Even Ken Ham used this same language in 2005 about giraffes requiring irreducibly complex features to make a long neck but today identifies the long neck as the product of genetic rearrangements of DNA from an ancestor with a short neck.

I’ll end by repeating what I have written before: there is no biblical evidence of such radical changes to organisms. To say that animals reproduce after “their own kind” is to confirm the ordinary observation that all species, as they have been recognized for millennia, give birth to more of their own species. The bible references horses and donkeys very soon after the Flood with no indication that they are any different than we might understand them today. For more on this please see my article (YEC Biblical Evolution: I have a Book that Says Otherwise) written soon after the Ken Ham/Bill Nye debate in which I talk about Ken Ham’s most public attempt to reorient creationism to accommodate a radical creationist’ form of Darwinism.  It accounts for the fact that all the diversity of life we see today and in the recent fossil record must be accounted for in the time between the Flood and the creationist singular ice age and the fact that it requires radical amounts of natural selection (the Darwinian mechanism), mutations and genetic drift to accomplish such changes.

Creationists of the not so distant past believed that giraffes were giraffes and okapi were okapi just as they were created to be. Today’s neocreationist says the okapi is a giraffe and should be identified as one.  But even here they have it backward, their own sign points out that most giraffids had short necks and therefore the long-neck giraffe is an aberration.  It is the long-necked giraffe that suffers from identify issues.  They should be identifying as okapi.

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Thanks to Facebook friend I.K.E. and satire publication BabylonBee for the title inspiration.

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