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So you’re saying the two can’t both be true? Heck, I’m a Christian, I believe in God, and I also believe that the ideas behind evoloution are less about disproving the existence of God, and more about the adaptability of God’s creation.

I think it’s a common perception that evolution gives animals things to make living easier. But it’s actually that some mutated animals use their mutations to their advantage.

So, while I’ve had it up to here with religious whack-jobs and I.D., I hear “The giraffe has that long neck so it can reach the high leaves” more as sloppy science than a pushing of divine theory. A more accurate description would have been something like “The giraffe uses its long neck so it can reach the high leaves”, leaving the “why” to philosophers and sex-crazed theologians.

I completely disagree. When I hear (or read) “The giraffe has that long neck so it can reach the high leaves” I in fact picture millennia of _evolution_ that has “given” this creature we call a giraffe this long neck. I mean, the giraffe started out as a single-cell organism like you and me, yes? For whatever reason, this species benefitted from reaching up high… and the years of development complied.

That’s how I read it anyway. I see no offense to Darwinists.

No, they both can’t be true. They are polar opposites.

But then again, I’m an atheist, so I’m burning in hell, anyway.

And while I understand and appreciate the intent to try to reconcile the two as a means towards getting people to live together peaceably, I think that ships already sailed. Sailed, hit an iceberg, and plunged to the ocean floor.

i am less concerned with the supposed implied intelligent design (which i do not see). my focus falls upon the fact that them having long necks is thought to be for fighting and not feeding…talk about out of date science…

No offense to the blogger, but I find it really hard to believe that the administrators of the San Diego Zoo have “hatched” some vast conspiracy to push the agenda of believers in teleology or “intelligent design”.

If anyone would be opposed to the intelligent design “theory” it would be zoologists, people who are well informed and have studied for the biology, etc.

I think it is just lazy English…or perhaps using the simplest terms to speak most efficiently to children and people who speak English as a second language…and to unedjucated barking mad fundamentalists… ;)

Me votes lazy Englishes.

Polar opposites?

It’s not a matter of reconcilliation. Growing up, I had my doubts about evolution, but after taking biology and physical anthropology courses in college, my eyes were opened to the broader scope of evolutionary FACT, which extends far beyond the origin of man.

My vote is lazy english and nitpicking. If this was a conspiracy to promote ID than it is an awful one.

But I’m just now realizing that getting into a mostly subjective, pseudo-scientific, quasi-religous debate is pretty much wasting everyone’s time, so we’ll agree to just disagree.

Giraffe’s long necks enable them to reach food high in the treetops. Giraffes have long necks because it offered them a survival advantage.

Giraffes did not decide to grow long necks. No entity gave them long necks (unless there was some selective breeding done by those aliens from Chariots of the Gods).

Yes I think you’re correct that the phrasing is purposeful to either be inclusive of those visitors who are subscribers to creationism or the person who said them believes in creation and this was their way of fulfilling the minimum requirements of their position.

The whale watch naturalist classes I’ve taken for the past three years do not include this sort of thing. We talk openly about evolution and how much we do or don’t know about the evolution of mammals and the local geological history. The classes are presented by the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium which is part of the Los Angeles Department of Rec & Parks.

I think you share my secular paranoia about wing-nuts and their attempts to return US culture to the 1950s.

Seeing as this did happen in San Diego, I would say it warrants investigating, in light of the recent furor over the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the SD Natural History Museum.

(Curiously, I remember reading the article at the above link in the LA Times but it has since disappeared from their data base. Fortunately topix.net had it.)

I am a pastafarian. I am a convert. The flying spaghetti monster (FSM) has his noodly appendages in all of this making you think evolution is an absolute but really its just a blend of ID.
Read about the FSM his church here: http://www.venganza.org/

CORRECTION: I found the original article I mentioned above on the LA Times site in archives, but now it costs $$ to read it.

Seriously? You really thought those types of descriptions was a thinly veiled promotion of intelligent design? Are you sure you weren’t just bored?

There is no evolution, only DE-evolution. Humankind prefers to put up barriers and put labels on other in order to destroy the other. Getting hyper-paranoid about this shit causes more stress, which results in shorter lifespans, and eventually we will be no more.

Umm actually the advantage that giraffes have with the long necks isn’t for reaching leaves in trees, but rather for mating battles (giraffes use their necks as clubs… longer neck means more leverage, more likelihood of winning a battle with another male giraffe and getting the chance to impregnate the females. If the SD Wild Animal Park is still talking about tree leaves they’re about 20 years out of date in their giraffe biology. I find that offensive.

Sorry to be so late in chiming in but I was out in the desert finding god. He says intelligent design is bullshit. And he says to say hai.

From my time at the L.A. Zoo as an employee and also concurrently for the last two years there as a volunteer docent, I found little love in-house for any theory but evolution.

I have no trouble saying that a lot of the explanations imparted about any given animal in the zoos collection were simplified but I never found it to be due to any perceived “pressures of the marketplace.”

The L.A. Zoo’s docent program is a pretty arduous 26-week educational ordeal and those who successfully complete it get a good foundation knowledge in the animal sciences. So if information imparted on any given animal is “dumbed down” so to speak, frankly it’s because employees and volunteers are dealing with a majority of visitors to the zoo who are interested but only up to a certain point.

As to Don saying the food accessiblity issue is somehow archaic info, unless there’s some wry humor at work that I’m too dense to catch, it ain’t all about sex. A giraffe’s gotta eat first in order to have the strength to club at each other for the right to make more giraffes.

When I taught high school students about biodiversity, we were instructed to avoid using terminology like “plan” or “design” in any context. You couldn’t, say, talk about how the body plan of a frog is well suited to swimming. Mostly for the reasons you point out.

It can be hard to anticipate the way your words can be used and misused.

You’re reading too much into a tour guide’s verbal usage of punctuation (and possibly the word “so,” a somewhat ambiguous adverb in that case). But now you have me wondering what type of Atheist you are. Most Atheists I’ve met are just as loony as any God-believer.

But I do agree that Intelligent Design is bullshit.