Thursday, June 24, 2010

Isn't evolution wonderful? Tricksy plants

Ever see a plant with eyes or noses? I'm no horticulturist, but I never have.

Yet here are a number of plants that (we are given to believe) somehow figured out how to make themselves look or smell like other things, to serve their purposes.

Amazing!

O LORD, how manifold are your works!
In wisdom have you made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.

(Psalm 104:24)

5 comments:

Death or Glory Toad said...

Love how rye was smart and decided to copy wheat. It must've wanted to get eaten too. Equal opportunity for plants! Specially when rye got so good at wheat that it one-upped the wheat! Go rye!

Herding Grasshoppers said...

Wow! Those plants are fascinating!

Don't you just love how the article opens with a question...

How in the world could a plant know what rotting flesh looks like, what a skunk smells like or how to replicate the sex pheromones of wasps?

... it can't answer?

But we can.

Psalm 104:24
How many are your works, O LORD!
In wisdom you made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.

104:31
May the glory of the LORD endure forever;
may the LORD rejoice in his works.

kateg said...

God is great... from the furthest star to the most minute detail...amazing.

It's funny that the trick-ees of these amazing plants haven't learned yet. I thought the "fittest" was supposed to figure that stuff out.

DJP said...

Kate, you just don't understand. But somewhere there's a 53000-word study explaining how none of this is as it appears.

Ron (aka RealityCheck) said...

“somewhere there's a 53000-word study explaining how none of this is as it appears”

Yeah, you got that right. I remember once debating with an Atheist about how the “Bombardier Beetle” (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2985392003153442886#) could not have possibly evolved and he sent me to some ridiculous link where somebody argued that because each part of the beetle “may” be found in some other living thing(s), it was “probable” that all the parts “simply” came together in the beetle. I remember a few days later my son had built the “International Space Station” out of Lego and I joked with him that I wasn’t sure “he” did it. I asked him, “how do I know that all those parts didn’t just come together from other smaller things that were already built?”. It was a great object lesson for how much “faith” evolution takes to believe in.