written 16
June 2018
published 23 June 2018
Each spine is made of a brittle
crystalline material, hollow up the center, but closed with an off-center knob
at the tip. When an animal presses
against the tip of the spine, the knob shears off, leaving a surgically sharp
point, which can penetrate the animal's skin.
The pressure that shears the tip also compresses the spine into the body
of the plant, pressurizing a flexible sack of toxic juice at the base of the
spine. When the tip shears, and injects
the animal, the pressurized toxin races up the hollow spine into the body of
the animal. This irritating chemical is
what gives the nettle a sting.
The simplicity of the design, and
the elegance of the features, all working with minimum effort, using the force
of the predator to power the defensive reaction, left me in awe. I had been building things for years at that
age, and could appreciate good design and craftsmanship. That a plant could execute such a design gave
me pause to consider the wonder of natural design. The relatively recent field of bio-mimicry examines
biological systems for inspiration in technological advances.
The idea of design intention in
nature is contrary to materialist science, which postulates a world of dead
matter, evolving through meaningless accidental mutations. At the other
extreme, Intelligent Design, an anti-evolution variation of Creationism, is based
on a literal interpretation of the Bible and assumes God created everything in
the relatively recent past. Both seem
inadequate.
An example of ongoing evolution is insects
developing resistance to the insecticides used to control them. In addition to becoming resistant, one
species of grasshopper placed a metabolized variation of the insecticide into
the foam it builds around its egg case, creating a toxic barrier against
predation by other insects. Materialist
science would say that many grasshoppers died before a random mutation induced
resistance, but this doesn't explain how a simple insect seemed to be aware of
the function of the toxic material, and applied it for its own benefit.
In a previous article, I talked
about the concept of randomness, which implies a lack of pattern, or meaning,
in a process. The only accurate
statement an observer can make is that there "appears" to be no
pattern, rather than the system "has" no pattern. Darwinian
evolutionary theory declares that evolution is random, without purpose, so the
proposal that there is meaning in evolution is a challenge, but there are
rigorous, peer reviewed experiments that support this challenge.
In the late 80s, a team of
researchers, led by the British biologist John Cairn, experimented on bacteria
that lived only on lactose. They disabled
the gene that fabricated the enzyme which metabolized lactose, fundamental to
cell function. They put these disabled
bacteria in a lactose environment, to see what would happen. Classic mechanistic biology suggests that
evolution can come only from mutation during cell division, but cell division
takes energy. The disabled bacteria
couldn't access any of the energy in their surroundings, so they should have died,
but the experimenters found thriving colonies of cells. Further investigation showed there had been a
specific repair to the disabled gene for lactose metabolism.
Cairns submitted these results to
the British science journal Nature, which was reluctant to publish such a
revolutionary result, but Cairns was a respected biologist in England, and the
article was published. The US journal
Science wrote scathing reviews, calling it a step backward for science. Subsequent replication of the experiment by
other researchers confirmed the results, and biological theory had to
evolve. Even at the single cell level,
meaningful evolution takes place. There
is immanent, purposeful intelligence in nature.
