The Amazing Design of Living Things

WHEN anthropologists dig in the earth and find a triangular piece of sharp flint, they conclude that it must have been designed by someone to be the tip of an arrow. Such things designed for a purpose, scientists agree, could not be products of chance.

When it comes to living things, however, the same logic is often abandoned. A designer is not considered necessary. But the simplest single-celled organism, or just the DNA of its genetic code, is far more complex than a shaped piece of flint. Yet evolutionists insist that these had no designer but were shaped by a series of chance events.

However, Darwin recognized the need for some designing force and gave natural selection the job. “Natural selection,” he said, “is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good.”1 That view, however, is now losing favor.

Stephen Gould reports that many contemporary evolutionists now say that substantial change “may not be subject to natural selection and may spread through populations at random.”2 Gordon Taylor agrees: “Natural selection explains a small part of what occurs: the bulk remains unexplained.”3 Geologist David Raup says: “A currently important alternative to natural selection has to do with the effects of pure chance.”4 But is “pure chance” a designer? Is it capable of producing the complexities that are the fabric of life?

Evolutionist Richard Lewontin admitted that organisms “appear to have been carefully and artfully designed,” so that some scientists viewed them as “the chief evidence of a Supreme Designer.”5 It will be useful to consider some of this evidence.

Little Things

Let us start with the smallest of living things: single-celled organisms. A biologist said that single-celled animals can “catch food, digest it, get rid of wastes, move around, build houses, engage in sexual activity” and “with no tissues, no organs, no hearts and no minds—really have everything we’ve got.”6

Diatoms, one-celled organisms, take silicon and oxygen from seawater and make glass, with which they construct tiny “pillboxes” to contain their green chlorophyll. They are extolled by one scientist for both their importance and their beauty: “These green leaves enclosed in jewel boxes are pastures for nine tenths of the food of everything that lives in the seas.” A large part of their food value is in the oil that diatoms make, which also helps them bob buoyantly near the surface where their chlorophyll can bask in sunlight.

Their beautiful glass-box coverings, this same scientist tells us, come in a “bewildering variety of shapes circles, squares, shields, triangles, ovals, rectangles always exquisitely ornamented with geometric etchings. These are filigreed in pure glass with such fine skill that a human hair would have to be sliced lengthwise into four hundred slices to fit between the marks.”

One group of ocean-dwelling animals, called radiolarians, make glass and with it build “glass sunbursts, with long thin transparent spikelets radiating from a central crystal sphere.” Or “glass struts are built into hexagons and used to make simple geodesic domes.” Of a certain microscopic builder it is said: “One geodesic dome will not do for this superarchitect; it has to be three lacelike fretted glass domes, one inside another.”8 Words fail to describe these marvels of design—it takes pictures to do so.

Sponges are made up of millions of cells, but only a few different kinds. A college textbook explains: “The cells are not organized into tissues or organs, yet there is a form of recognition among the cells that holds them together and organizes them.”9 If a sponge is mashed through a cloth and separated into its millions of cells, those cells will come together and rebuild the sponge. Sponges construct skeletons of glass that are very beautiful. One of the most amazing is Venus’s-flower-basket.

Of it, one scientist says: “When you look at a complex sponge skeleton such as that made of silica spicules which is known as [Venus’s-flower-basket], the imagination is baffled. How could quasi-independent microscopic cells collaborate to secrete a million glassy splinters and construct such an intricate and beautiful lattice? We do not know.”10 But one thing we do know: Chance is not the likely designer.

Partnerships

Many cases exist where two organisms appear designed to live together. Such partnerships are examples of symbiosis (living together). Certain figs and wasps need each other in order to reproduce. Termites eat wood but need the protozoa in their bodies to digest it. Similarly, cattle, goats and camels could not digest the cellulose in grass without the help of bacteria and protozoa living inside them. A report says: “The part of a cow’s stomach where that digestion takes place has a volume of about 100 quarts and contains 10 billion microorganisms in each drop.”Algae and fungi team up and become lichens. Only then can they grow on bare rock to start turning rock into soil.

Stinging ants live in the hollow thorns of acacia trees. They keep leaf-eating insects off the tree and they cut up and kill vines that try to climb on the tree. In return, the tree secretes a sugary fluid that the ants relish, and it also produces small false fruit, which serves as food for the ants. Did the ant first protect the tree and then the tree rewarded it with fruit? Or did the tree make fruit for the ant and the ant then thanked it with protection? Or did it all chance to happen at once?

Many cases of such cooperation exist between insects and flowers. Insects pollinate flowers, and in return flowers feed insects pollen and nectar. Some flowers produce two kinds of pollen. One fertilizes seeds, the other is sterile but feeds insect visitors. Many flowers have special markings and smells to guide insects to the nectar. En route the insects pollinate the flower. Some flowers have trigger mechanisms. When insects touch the trigger they get swatted by the pollen-containing anthers.

For example, the Dutchman’s-pipe cannot pollinate itself but needs insects to bring in pollen from another flower. The plant has a tubular leaf that envelops its flower, and this leaf is coated with wax. Insects, attracted by the smell of the flower, land on the leaf and plunge down the slippery slide to a chamber at the bottom. There, ripe stigmas receive the pollen that the insects brought in, and pollination takes place. But for three more days the insects are trapped there by hairs and the waxed sides. After that, the flower’s own pollen ripens and dusts the insects. Only then do the hairs wilt, and the waxed slide bends over until it is level. The insects walk out and, with their new supply of pollen, fly to another Dutchman’s-pipe to pollinate it. The insects do not mind their three-day visit, since they feast on nectar stored there for them. Did all of this happen by chance? Or did it happen by intelligent design?

Some types of Ophrys orchids have on their petals a picture of a female wasp, complete with eyes, antennae and wings. It even gives off the odor of a female in mating condition! The male comes to mate, but only pollinates the flower. Another orchid, the bucket orchid, has a fermented nectar that makes the bee wobbly on its feet; it slips into a bucket of liquid and the only way out is to wriggle under a rod that dusts the bee with pollen.

Nature’s “Factories”

Green leaves of plants feed the world, directly or indirectly. But they cannot function without the help of tiny roots. Millions of rootlets each root tip fitted with a protective cap, each cap lubricated with oil push their way through the soil. Root hairs behind the oily cap absorb water and minerals, which travel up minute channels in the sapwood to the leaves. In the leaves sugars and amino acids are made, and these nutrients are sent throughout the tree and into the roots.

Certain features of the circulatory system of trees and plants are so amazing that many scientists regard them as almost miraculous. First, how is the water pumped two or three hundred feet above the ground? Root pressure starts it on its way, but in the trunk another mechanism takes over. Water molecules hold together by cohesion. Because of this cohesion, as water evaporates from the leaves the tiny columns of water are pulled up like ropes ropes reaching from the roots to the leaves, and traveling at up to 200 feet an hour. This system, it is said, could lift water in a tree about two miles high! As excess water evaporates from the leaves (called transpiration), billions of tons of water are recycled into the air, once again to fall as rain a perfectly designed system!

There is more. The leaves need nitrates or nitrites from the ground to make vital amino acids. Some amounts are put into the soil by lightning and by certain free-living bacteria. Nitrogen compounds in adequate quantities are also formed by legumes plants such as peas, clover, beans and alfalfa. Certain bacteria enter their roots, the roots provide the bacteria with carbohydrates, and the bacteria change, or fix, nitrogen from the soil into usable nitrates and nitrites, producing some 200 pounds per acre each year.

There is still more. Green leaves take energy from the sun, carbon dioxide from the air and water from the plant’s roots to make sugar and give off oxygen. The process is called photosynthesis, and it happens in cell bodies called chloroplasts so small that 400,000 can fit into the period at the end of this sentence. Scientists do not understand the process fully. “There are about seventy separate chemical reactions involved in photosynthesis,” one biologist said. “It is truly a miraculous event.”12 Green plants have been called nature’s “factories”—beautiful, quiet, nonpolluting, producing oxygen, recycling water and feeding the world. Did they just happen by chance? Is that truly believable?

Some of the world’s most famous scientists have found it hard to believe. They see intelligence in the natural world. Nobel-prize-winning physicist Robert A. Millikan, although a believer in evolution, did say at a meeting of the American Physical Society: “There’s a Divinity that shapes our ends . . . A purely materialistic philosophy is to me the height of unintelligence. Wise men in all the ages have always seen enough to at least make them reverent.” In his speech he quoted Albert Einstein’s notable words, wherein Einstein said that he did “try humbly to comprehend even an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifest in nature.”13

Evidence of design surrounds us, in endless variety and amazing intricacy, indicating a superior intelligence. This conclusion is also voiced in the Bible, where design is attributed to a Creator whose “invisible qualities are clearly seen from the world’s creation onward, because they are perceived by the things made, even his eternal power and Godship, so that they are inexcusable.” Romans 1:20.

With so much evidence of design in the life around us, it does seem “inexcusable” to say that undirected chance is behind it. Hence, for the psalmist to credit an intelligent Creator is certainly not unreasonable: “How many your works are, O Jehovah! All of them in wisdom you have made. The earth is full of your productions. As for this sea so great and wide, there there are moving things without number, living creatures, small as well as great.” Psalm 104:24, 25.