Hammer Head

One of my favorite examples of design is the woodpecker. I would like to thank Gary Parker for the original inspiration for this story.

Woodpeckers are famous for slamming their heads into trees. According to my sources, woodpeckers hit a tree with their head 10 times per second. For homework, you go slam your head into a tree 10 times in a second. On second thought - Don't! You're not designed for it. The woodpecker is.

What do you need to be able to slam your head into trees for a living? First of all you need a hard beak. If you don't have a hard beak you will fold up your beak like an accordion the first time you hit a tree. With a folded beak, you are facing a slow lingering death of starvation.

You also need a hard head. I know some of you do, but not like the woodpecker. The deceleration on the woodpecker's head is 1,000 g's or 250x the acceleration astronauts feel on take-off. You need a really hard head to withstand that kind of impact.

Okay, so you have a hard beak and a hard head. Are you ready to slam your head into trees? Not quite. You also need to protect your brain. Without protection, the impact on the head is enough to rip your brain loose. To protect it, there is a layer of fat that surrounds the brain. In addition, there are muscles that pull on the brain the moment the woodpecker hits the tree. That acts as a shock absorber for the brain.

Now you have a hard beak, a hard head, and your brain is protected. Are you ready to slam your head into trees? No, not yet. The woodpecker has feathers that cover his nose. Without those feathers, he'd breathe in wood chips and that wouldn't be healthy.

Now you have a hard beak, a hard head, and your brain and your nose are protected. Are you ready to slam your head into trees? Of course not! High speed photography has shown that a woodpecker closes his eyes every time he hits the tree. Their are two theories why. One theory is that it keeps wood chips out of his eyes. The other theory is that it keeps the eyeballs in the head.

Now you have a hard beak, a hard head, and your brain, your nose, and your eyes are protected. Are you ready to slam your head into trees? You guessed it. It is very important that you hit the tree with your beak perpendicular to the tangent of the trunk of tree. In other words, you want to hit the tree so all the force goes straight back through the head and not so the force spins your head sideways and snaps your neck.

Now you have a hard beak, a hard head, the right neck muscles, and your brain, your nose, and your eyes are protected. Are you ready to slam your head into trees? Just one more thing. The woodpecker feet and tail are specially designed to hold the woodpecker on the tree. Otherwise, the woodpecker would bounce off every time it hit the tree. While not life threatening, that would really reduce the woodpecker's efficiency.

So now, you are ready to slam your head into trees. But why would you do that? You're hungry of course. Would any self-respecting bug come answer the door when a woodpecker comes knocking? Of course not. So the woodpecker has a long, skinny, sticky, hairy tongue. The woodpecker's tongue is long and skinny enough to go down the bug's little tunnels. The hairs on the tongue send messages back to the woodpecker's brain -- "wood, wood, wood, wood, bug!" When the brain gets the message, "bug" , the woodpecker pull in his tongue -- with a bug stuck to the end.

But where do you put a long tongue in a short beak? A human tongue starts at the back of the mouth. A frog tongue starts at the front of the mouth. A woodpecker tongue starts in the nose, winds around the skull, and then goes out the mouth. That gives the woodpecker all the space he needs for his tongue.

The woodpecker is a good example of irreducible complexity. Unless all the pieces are there, the woodpecker is a failure. A step-by-step natural selection scenario doesn't work. The woodpecker point to a designer.