If a person were to drink even 1/10 the amount of salt water that a sea gull drinks, he would become extremely dehydrated. The secret of the gull's ability to drink salt water lies in a special pair of glands located just above its eyes. Many fine blood vessels surround these glands, and the glands act as a desalination membrane to extract salt from the blood.
It has taken mankind thousands of years and enormous amounts of money and research to develop similar membranes for use in saltwater desalination plants. In the sea gull, the salt is removed as a concentrated saltwater solution which rolls down the beak of the sea gull and drops back into the ocean. Each drop is five times as salty as the gull's own blood and twice as salty as seawater. This complex purification mechanism could not have arisen by chance mutations, because there are too many irreducibly complex components which would all had to have happened at once. If the gull had not possessed a perfectly working desalination system from the onset, it would never have been capable of living at the seashore. Long before a slowly evolving salt elimination gland was able to operate, all of the sea gulls would have died off, being unable to drink seawater!
From A Closer Look at the Evidence by Kleiss, November 29.
