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Saturday 17 December 2011

THE HAND OF THE DESIGNER


"Who among all these does not know that the hand of the LORD has done this, in whose hand [is] the life of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind? Does not the ear test words and the mouth taste its food?" (Job 12:9-11)


The Venus flytrap is one of the most fascinating plants you will ever find. In college, I had a Venus flytrap that I would now and again feed with a morsel of hamburger from the college lunchroom. One day a classmate saw me carefully wrapping up the morsel and asked what I was going to do with it. I explained that I was taking it back for my plant. He refused to believe that a plant would eat meat. Well, he stared in doubt as I placed the morsel of meat into one of the leaves and tripped the trigger. When the leaf closed on the meat, he fled the room in absolute disbelief.

Did you ever wonder how the Venus flytrap's leaf can close so rapidly on a fly or other morsel? It has taken scientists some time to figure out how it is done. When the trigger hairs are triggered, the cells on the outer layer of the leaf grow incredibly fast. The closing leaf is really the result of astonishingly rapid cell growth! It takes days for the cells on the inside of the leaf to catch up. As they do, the leaf slowly opens again.

The wild growth of the leaf's outer cells is started by an electrical impulse produced when something brushes up against the trigger cells inside the leaf.

The complex systems of the Venus flytrap are difficult to explain as the product of no intelligence. They are yet another example of the variations possible to an infinitely imaginative Creator.

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2 comments:

Admiral Hestorb said...

You know, I knew this and had forgotten.

I saw Katnip Lounge's comment and went exploring to find you here as well. I too have a human blog..whinging there as well. :-) We do have some things in common I am happy to see. But most of all, I am happy to have found you.

Carole

CATachresis said...

Hi Carole, yes I had this explained to me years ago. I'm not a scientist, but There are many such complexities that are better explained by intelligent design!

I am thrilled to have found you too :) Thanks for coming by!