The Camel Is a Set of Dials
Nature · · 6 min read · By No Design Editorial
The hump is not a water tank, and it does not make water either. Give up the myth and the real engineering turns out to be far better.
The camel is built for a place that kills most animals quickly. Two rows of long eyelashes screen its eyes against blown sand. A translucent third eyelid wipes across the eyeball to clear whatever gets through. The nostrils close to slits during a storm. The feet splay so the animal rides over soft sand instead of sinking, the way a snowshoe works.
Now the water problem, where the popular story needs fixing, because the truth is more impressive than the myth. The hump is not a water tank, which most people now know. But the follow-up claim, that the camel converts the hump's fat into water, is also misleading. Burning fat does release water, roughly a gram per gram of fat. The catch is that taking in the oxygen needed to burn it means breathing harder, and in dry desert air the camel loses more water out of its lungs than the reaction produces. In heat, the net result is a deficit.
So the hump is what it plainly is: a concentrated fuel store that also, by keeping fat piled in one place rather than wrapped around the whole animal, helps it shed heat. That is only a demotion if you assumed the hump was the interesting part, and it never was.
The real engineering sits elsewhere, and here is where the interesting question starts. Almost nothing about this animal is a matter of having a feature or lacking one. Everything is a setting. The camel tolerates a swing in body temperature that would put you in hospital, so it does not waste water sweating to hold a fixed number. Its red blood cells are shaped to survive rehydration that would burst yours.
Each of those is a number, and the numbers sit at values that look chosen. A dial set to a value is a different kind of claim from a part that is simply present.
'Do they not ever reflect on camels, how they were masterfully created?' (Quran 88:17)
From Chapter 3: Signs in the Beasts.
Tags: Mammals, Desert, Corrections, Quran