Upright plants explained in reports in ScienceDaily 2 May 2018, and PNAS doi: 10.1073/pnas.1801895115, published online 30 April 2018.
Plants are exquisitely sensitive to being tilted, and will change their growth direction to keep growing upwards if knocked off the vertical by only a few degrees. It has long been known that plants sense the line of gravity using cells filled with granules named statoliths. These settle on the bottom of cells. If the plant is tilted they roll around and settle on what has become the lowest part of the cell. This provides a new reference point for plant growth. The movement and change in position of the grain pile, causes hormones changes that alter the direction of plant growth.
This method of monitoring inclination has intrigued scientists who claim it seems an inefficient way to monitor very small changes of inclination. Grains in a pile, e.g. a pile of sand, tend to interact with one another by friction and jamming together, and will not flow until they are tilted beyond a certain threshold, when they suddenly start flowing in bursts. According to ScienceDaily this property makes a pile of granules “a lousy clinometer”.
Researchers in France have carefully observed the movement of statoliths when cells were tilted, and found they always flowed and settled into a pile with a horizontal surface, behaving more like a liquid than a pile of granules. They then made a model of the statolith system in artificial cells, using microbeads the same size as real ones. Their observations showed that the statoliths are being constantly being stirred within the cell.
They concluded: “We reveal that statoliths behave like a liquid, not a granular material, due to the cell activity that strongly agitates statoliths.”
Editorial Comment: Any plant without an inbuilt ‘Up/Down GPS is finished, especially when it lives on land. Roots need to grow down, and stems need to grow up or extinction follows rapidly. Note also that this bead balance system will not work unless the granules and the means of agitating them is present, along with the means of converting the position of the pile into directional information informing the plant it is off-kilter and needs to adjust its growth pattern had to be in place before any plants started growing on land.
There is no doubt this is a designed system. This is confirmed by the fact that it took a team of six scientists using cleverly designed nanotechnology to make something artificial do the same thing as the plant cell. Therefore, unless they acknowledged this, these scientists and those who read their report are truly without excuse when they face the Creator of the plants who said He made fully functioning land plants, growing in the dry land on the third day of creation.
Were you helped by this item? If so, consider making a donation so we can keep sending out Evidence News and add more items to this archive. For USA tax deductible donations click here. For UK tax deductible donations click here. For Australia and rest of world click here.
Evidence News vol. 18, No. 5
30 May 2018
Creation Research Australia