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---------------------- 2268 - Learning from the Evolution of Plants and Animals
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- Plants and animals are instructing us every day, if we were only listening. The best human qualities I can learn from my dog.
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- Confucius said: “When you first become a student a teacher will come.”
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- Job, chapter 12, verses 7 through 10: “ But now ask the animals to teach you, and the birds in the air to tell you, or, the reptiles on Earth to instruct you, and the fish or the sea to inform you, which of all these does not know that the hand of God has done this? In this hand is the soul of every living thing and the life breath of all mankind.”
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- What can we learn from the humpback whale? It weighs 30 tons and is 40 feet long yet it can gather its food in the ocean by spiraling upward in a circle as small as 5 feet diameter. It starts its spiral swim deep beneath a school of crustaceans, or, fish. It begins blowing a stream of bubbles that too begins spiraling upward. The rising bubbles act as a net that corrals the fish at the surface where a wide mouth quickly engulfs the entire school for a meal.
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- How can a creature this big and heavy have such agility under the water? Science is learning that it has to do with the leading edge of the humpback whale’s powerful flippers. The flippers are not smooth, they are serrated with a row of protruding bumps called tubercles. The tubercles make water accelerate over the flippers in an organized rotating flow. The effect is to increase lift and reduce drag. This in turn allows the massive whale to spiral in the water at very steep angles.
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- If the flippers were smooth the massive whale would not be able to make its tight rising turns. The water would churn and eddy behind each flipper would cease to create the needed lift. Soon jetliners will have bumps on their leading edge to increase the airplanes lift and agility in the air.
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- In a similar way, engineers are mimicking the seagull’s wings. Seagull wings flex and bend at the elbows and the shoulder joints. These bends in the wings allow seagulls to hover, dive, and climb rapidly. The U.S. Air Force is keen to develop highly maneuverable aircraft for use in searching for chemical and biological weapons in big cities. Airplane wings will soon have joints.
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- Another example of nature’s expert engineering is the feet of the gecko lizard. The gecko can run upside down on the ceiling. Gecko’s can do this using tiny hair-like structures , called setae, that cover their feet. The tiny hairs exploit a minute electromagnetic molecular force between surfaces.
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- The tiny setae increase the surface area of the gecko’s feet in contact with the ceiling. The thousands of setae on the gecko’s feet produce enough attraction to hold the lizard’s weight, defying gravity. Researcher’s are hoping to design medical adhesives that can be used in applications where a chemical adhesive can not be used.
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- NASA is building robots that use multiple legs to walk like a scorpion.
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- Car manufacturers are putting cars in wind tunnels that are designed to simulate the box fish that is shaped like a box but has very low drag in the water.
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- Researchers are also trying to design automobile bodies that have a shock absorbing property of abalone shells. Automobiles could be built lighter and stronger simulating this technology found in nature‘s mollusks.
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- Ants use a traffic control technique laying trails radiating out from the nest that forks at an angle of 60 degrees. When an ant is returning to the nest and reaches a fork in the trail it instinctively takes the path that deviates the least, which inevitably leads home. The geometry of the forking trails optimizes the flow of ants up and down the trails.
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- Engineers will tell you that bees should not be able to fly with their bulk and short wings, but, they do. Their wings sweep pack in a 90 degree arc, then flip over as it returns, 230 times a second. Engineers wish they could design a hovercraft that could do just that.
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- Migrating birds navigate with pinpoint accuracy over long distances in all types of weather. Birds accomplish their navigation using Earth’s magnetic field. However, the Earth’s magnetic field lines vary from place to place in pointing toward true north. Birds have a unique capability to calibrate their internal compass to the setting sun each evening. Since the position of the sunset changes with latitude and seasons birds compensate for these changes using their biological clock that keeps track of the time of year.
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- Evolution implies that life arose from inanimate chemicals which formed into self-replicating cells, and slowly developed into more and more complex living organisms, eventually into apes and humans, being the most intellectual of these productions.
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- Microevolution at the tiniest levels allows cells to create little molecules that carry supplies from one side of the cell to the other. Other molecules act as sign posts to tell the mover molecules when to turn right and when to turn left. Other cells have “motors” that propel the cells through liquid.
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- The more we study cells at the micro level the more we find them to be enormously complex. More complex, in fact, than any machine we have built in the 21st century. Microevolution has allowed life-forms to slowly evolve bye means of extremely slight modifications into million of different forms of life on Earth.
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- Plants grow in spirals of 137.5 degrees that results in the ideal compact arrangement of growths. It is called the golden angle and it cannot be expressed as a simple fraction. 5/8 is close, but 8/13 is closer, and 13/21 is closer but no fraction exactly expresses the golden angle.
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- The spiral growths in plants does not occur if their growth angle strays from the golden angle by even a 1/10 of a degree. The growth that results creates a progression where each number is equal to the sum of the previous two: 1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55, etc. Buttercups have 5 pedals, blood roots have 8, fireweeds have 13, asters have 21, daisies have 34 and Michaelmas daisies have 55 or 89 petals. Bananas are five sided. Pineapples have ridges spiraling at the golden angle.
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- The small changes in microevolution accumulate and produce the big changes needed to make fish in to amphibians and apes in to man. Evolution made women beautiful so men would be attracted to them. It made them stupid so they would be attracted to men.
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- It is the mutations that provide the raw materials needed to create new species of life. Many of the DNA mutations are caused by Cosmic Rays coming to us from far away galaxies.
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- Natural selection leads to the production of new species. Natural selection favors those life-forms best suited to their environment while less suited life-forms eventually all die off. Natural selection chooses those gene mutations that make the best fit for their new environments.
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- The fossil records document the macro-evolutionary changes in plants and animals that resulted from microevolution. The Bible’s account of creation is accurate if interpreted correctly and does not conflict with true science. It is just that life is simply too complicated to have arisen by chance. Nature’s optimum design solutions give us the feeling of perfect inevitability. Pay attention to God’s plants and animals and you can learn something.
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- February 11, 2019 693
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