How Fast Are Plants?

Joel Kontinen


"Scientists have revealed intricate structural changes within protein molecules called phytochromes to show how plants and bacteria perceive light.

Scientists have revealed intricate structural changes in plants, fungi and bacteria in response to light, according to a new study published today in the open-access journal eLife."

Which is better designed or its vase?

Now, it seems that the flower is better designed -it sphytochromes give it supernatural speed.

“The phytochrome allows organisms to distinguish between two colours of light, giving plants, fungi and bacteria primitive two-colour vision,” explains lead author Elin Claesson, a doctoral student at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. “Key to its function is the initial response to light, where the light signal is translated into structural changes over a fraction of a second.

Flowers have other tricks that show they are designed. Sunflowers co-operate to get more space and more sunshine, eucalyptus sweats to keep cool and smart plants use a clever trick to avoid being eaten.

Source:

Ultrabright X-ray bursts reveal how plants respond to light within fraction of a second. eLIFE 31 March.

French Team Claims to Have Partly Solved Darwin’s Abominable Mystery (i.e. the Origin of Flowering Plants)

Welwitschia mirabilis. Image courtesy of Michael O'Brien, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).




Joel Kontinen

For Charles Darwin, the origin of flowering plants was an abominable mystery. Beauty did not fit in well into a worldview where there was no design and no Creator. What is more, flowers tend to be very complex.

Evolutionists belief that flowering plants or angiosperms evolved from “simpler” plants called gymnosperms.

Recently, French researchers discovered that a hardy desert plant known as Welwitschia mirabilis might shed light on Darwin’s abominable mystery.

W. mirabilis is a living fossil that obviously can live for a thousand years despite very arid conditions.

Science Daily gives us some background information:

“Darwin long pondered the origin and rapid diversification of flowering plants, describing them as an ‘abominable mystery.’ In comparison with gymnosperms, which possess rather rudimentary male and female cones (like the pine cone), flowering plants present several innovations: the flower contains the male organs (stamens) and the female organs (pistil), surrounded by petals and sepals, while the ovules, instead of being naked, are protected within the pistil.”

Then the article describes the proposed solution to the Darwinian dilemma: Welwitschia mirabilis:

“Like other gymnosperms, [it] possesses separate male and female cones. What is exceptional is that the male cones possess a few sterile ovules and nectar, which indicates a failed attempt to invent the bisexual flower. Yet, in this plant (as well as in certain conifers), the researchers found genes similar to those responsible for the formation of flowers, and which are organized according to the same hierarchy (with the activation of one gene activating the next gene, and so on)!”

We would not expect to see an exclamation mark at the end of a paragraph in a scientific article, but there it is.

The article goes on to say:

“The fact that a similar gene cascade has been found in flowering plants and their gymnosperm cousins indicates that this is inherited from their common ancestor. This mechanism did not have to be invented at the time of the origins of the flower: it was simply inherited and reused by the plant, a process that is often at work in evolution.”

It’s a clever explanation in which facts and wishful thinking mesh.

While W. mirabilis might resemble some flowering plants, it does not follow that it shows how flowers evolved from gymnosperms.

Flowers appear suddenly and fully formed in the fossil record.

Even the earliest flowers look very modern.

Source:

CNRS (Délégation Paris Michel-Ange). 2017. Where do flowers come from? Shedding light on Darwin’s 'abominable mystery'. Science Daily. (24 February).

The Amazing Power of the Seed

Desert flowers can be colourful.


Joel Kontinen

Seeds are amazing things. They seem to be programmed to produce certain kinds of plants at the very earliest time this is possible.

In a desert environment, this might entail a long waiting time, perhaps even two or three years. A miracle occurs just a few hours after a heavy rain: the ground that hitherto had been brown or yellow becomes alive with green grasses and flowers of a variety colours – blue, white, yellow, red etc.

And all the genetic information for producing this beauty is packed into a tiny seed.

No wonder the Lord Jesus compared faith to a mustard seed. It is tiny but can do great deeds.

Clever Begonias: Blue Leaves Help Them Get More Energy from the Sun

Plum Paisley Begonias. Image courtesy of Karl Thomas Moore, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).





Joel Kontinen

For Charles Darwin, the origin of flowering plants was an abominable mystery. Why would the blind watchmaker produce so much beauty?

And they are not only beautiful but they are also amazingly smart and know how to communicate and co-operate with other plants.

Some plants might be able to count.

Plants have tiny but highly efficient factories called chloroplasts that convert sunlight into chemical energy.

Scientists used to think that this conversion happened more or less passively. However, new research published in the journal Nature Plants suggests that plants play a more active role in it.

A brief article in Science explains that British scientists have

“discovered a species of shade-dwelling begonia called Begonia pavonina … that arranges light absorbing components in its leaves to boost their light absorption.”

While “typical chloroplasts contain membrane-bound compartments called thylakoids that stack atop one another in a somewhat haphazard arrangement,” this flowering plant did it in a more sophisticated way:

“In B. pavonina, however, this stacking is far more regular, creating what are known as photonic crystals. These crystalline arrays strongly reflect blue light, giving the leaves an iridescent glow. But more importantly, they concentrate the more abundant green and red wavelengths of light on the leaves’ energy absorbing apparatus. The upshot is that B. pavonina’s leaves soak up as much as 10% more energy than other low-lying forest dwellers. That may not seem like much, but under the thick canopies of Malaysian forests where B. pavonina lives, that extra energy gives the plant the juice it needs to edge out its competitors.”

The take away message is that these flowers are far too clever to be the products of an entirely blind watchmaker. They are beautiful, they are intelligent, and they are designed.


Source:

Service, Robert F. 2016. Blue leaves help plants get extra energy from sun. Science (24 October).

Darwin’s Abominable Mystery Is Good for Us

Darwin didn’t understand their origin, but they’re good for us.


Joel Kontinen

Charles Darwin called the origin of flowering plants an abominable mystery that was difficult to account for by his theory.

Flowers do appear suddenly and fully formed in the fossil record. Even the earliest flowers look very modern.

Flowers need pollinators and pollinators need flowers. Evolutionists might need to invoke co-evolution, mutualism or symbiosis, but flowers are nevertheless beautiful, and many insects do a good job in helping them spread.

A recent paper in Nature concludes that the more variety in flowers (and insects) there is in a meadow, the more beneficial it is for us.

Science Daily summarises the findings of the research:

“The more it swarms, crawls, flies the better it is, say scientists. A diverse ecosystem populated by many species from all levels provides higher ecosystem services. Even rather unpopular insects and invisible soil-dwelling organisms are important.”

They are good for our health.

Reminds us of the very good world of Genesis.


Source:

Technical University of Munich (TUM). 2016. Flowering meadows benefit humankind: Greater biodiversity in grasslands leads to higher levels of ecosystem services. Science Daily. (17 August).

No Evolution in “15 Million-Year-Old” Flower Trapped in Amber

Strychnos. Image courtesy of Franz Eugen Köhler, Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen. Public domain.




Joel Kontinen

A long time ago, a flower was trapped in amber. Discovered recently in a mine in the Dominican Republic, the 2-centimetre (0.4 inches) long flower is “perfectly preserved”. Assumed to be between 15 and 45 million years old, it is “very similar” to its modern day relatives.

In other words, it has hardly changed at all. Strychnos electri, as it is called, “is thought to be a long-lost relative of modern plants including sunflowers, coffee, peppers, potatoes and mint.”

Evolution should be about change, but time and again we hear about stasis or non-change. In these cases, evidence does not match Darwinian expectations.

What they do suggests, however, is that flowers have been flowerers – and beautiful ones, too – for a very long time.

Some plants, such as ferns, araucariaea, cycads and the Wollemi Pine (Wollemia nobilis), have not changed since dino days.

Source:

Coghlan, Andy. 2016. Beautiful amber fossil flower reveals plant history of New World. New Scientist (15 February).

Exceptionally Preserved “125 Million Year Old” Flowering Plant Seeds Found

The origin of flowering plants is not an abominable mystery for those who believe the Bible is true.




Joel Kontinen

Not so long ago researchers thought that dinosaurs never saw grass. But then they discovered coprolite (a technical term for fossilised dung) that showed dinos had eaten grass.

A related myth to fall is Darwin’s abominable mystery or the genesis of flowering plants. He thought it was abominable because it bothered him. Neither he nor other evolutionists expected to find the seeds of angiosperms in early Cretaceous strata.

Now, research published in Nature shows that the world of dinosaurs was anything but drab. Pines were not the only plants they saw.

The researchers analysed

“75 different angiosperm taxa recovered from rich assemblages of angiosperm flowers, fruits and seeds in 11 mesofossil floras from eastern North America and Portugal, ranging in age from Barremian-Aptian to early or middle Albian, about 125–110 million years ago.”

This is not the first time that science publications report on finding flowers, seeds or pollen that are supposedly as old as or even older than dinosaurs.

Time and again, old agers have been wrong about the past.


Source:

Friis, Else Marie et al. 2015. Exceptional preservation of tiny embryos documents seed dormancy in early angiosperms. Nature 528, 551–554 (24 December).

Flowers for T. Rex

New research suggests that flowers were flowers during the dino era.



Joel Kontinen


The evolution of flowers is a big mystery for Darwinists. Charles Darwin actually called it an abominable mystery. A few years ago, evolutionists assumed that the plants that flourished at the time when dinosaurs roamed the world were very much different from what they are today.

However, fossilised dinosaur dung (technically known are coprolites) show that dinos actually ate plants.

A recent discovery suggests the need for a major revision to the evolutionary concept of flowers. According to Science Daily:

“Drilling cores from Switzerland have revealed the oldest known fossils of the direct ancestors of flowering plants. These beautifully preserved 240-million-year-old pollen grains are evidence that flowering plants evolved 100 million years earlier than previously thought, according to a new study in the open-access journal Frontiers in Plant Science.”

Once again, a single discovery upturns old evolutionary “truths”.

Incidentally, the model based on Genesis predicted that dinosaurs and flowering plants existed together.

Source:

New Fossils Push the Origin of Flowering Plants Back by 100 Million Years to the Early Triassic. ScienceDaily Oct. 1, 2013.

A Flower For T. Rex

In the perfect world of Eden, the earliest humans saw flowers.





Joel Kontinen


Dinosaurs were not supposed to have seen flowering plants or angiosperms, at least not according to the evolution-based worldview.

Charles Darwin thought that the origin of flowers was an abominable mystery, i.e., it did not support his view of evolution at all. The fossil record does not have much to say about them, but they appear suddenly and fully formed – just like the animals do.

Recently, Else Marie Friis at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm found a 3 centimetre (just over an inch) long fossilised flower at Åsen, Sweden. It is assumed to be 84 million years old, which in the evolution timetable means that T. rex would have seen it.

Not so many years ago, evolutionists believed that there were no grasses during the dinosaur era. This changed when they discovered that dino coprolites (fossilised dung) showed traces of grass.

Dinos had been eating grass.

In other words, the “facts” of the evolution model keep on changing all the time.

In the model based on Genesis, flowers and grasses appeared at the beginning of creation. Adam and Eve were able to enjoy their sight and fragrance in a perfect world.


Source:

Zuckerman, Wendy. 2011. Picking flowers in dinosaur-aged mud. New Scientist 2824, 14.