Episode Transcript
Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Dr John Ashton.
The other day, as I was driving along and passing all the cars on the road, and so many of the cars these days, days look so similar to me anyway. And I have a bit of an interest in cars, and particularly cars of the think there were some very interesting designs came out in those years. And then my thoughts, just as they were rambling on, rambled to all the.
The plastic that is used in cars these days. And I'd been talking to a mechanic recently, even mudguards and these sort of parts and the bumper bars and these sort of things are made of plastic. And I was saying, so much is made of plastic, our clothes are made of plastic and so forth.
And then I happened to read another article which talked about that by some particular date, not too far away, maybe 2050, something like that, that there would be more plastic in the oceans than fish. And I thought, wow, we're just producing so much of this material. And then as I was driving through the country at the time, thinking all these random thoughts that were just coming into my mind, I was thinking about all the trees, all the trees around me.
And I was thinking, wood is such a versatile material to build things out of. Now, we don't make cars out of wood, but I once did own a car that had the frame for the bodywork was actually made out of timber, and then it had aluminium bodywork, and that aluminium bodywork had been made by a coach builder over the wooden frame. And of course, I guess steel is the most appropriate material for cars.
But it made me think about wood and the versatility of wood and the number of uses of timber, the amazing properties of timber. I lived in Tasmania for a while, and down in that particular state of Australia, they have some of the tallest trees in Australia, and probably some of them are among the mountain ash trees, I think amongst some of the tallest trees that grow in the world. And these trees grow to hundreds of feet high.
And it's just amazing. This tree grows so high and it's relatively stable and it produce a huge amount of forage. And then, of course, some of the other trees, when I go on my walk, there's some Moreton Bay figs and trees, and some of these trees can have a huge canopy and cover a huge area.
And then, of course, in Tasmania, we had the famous Huon Pine, which is a timber that is quite an oily timber and hence resistant to attack by the Toledo worm and some of the other little burrowing worms that can attack timber boats. But it also is a beautiful timber to cut. It's very fine grained and sometimes it can have beautiful patterns.
I know my oldest daughter has made some beautiful furniture out of wood that we brought back when I had a licence one time when she would have been only about, well, twelve years, ten, 11 or 12 years of age. And we kept her for years. And then later she used to build some beautiful timber because of the patterns in it.
And wood has such interesting property, so we can build all these things. Some of it is very strong, so we can build bridges and carry a lot of force and weight on timber piers. We have timbers that can last in the ocean for ages, we can build boats out of it, and then we can make decorative furniture.
And it has insulative properties, and there's so many different timbers and they had different patterns and different properties. Like huan pine was resistant to rot and corrosion. And other timbers, like balsa timber, are so light we could build model planes out of them.
But then recently, too, I came across an article by a scientist, Joseph Harville, and he was for a while director of research and planning for the Department of Conservation and Land Management in Western Australia. And he's done a lot of research and forestry around the world, different parts of the world as well as Australia. And it was a very interesting article.
This scientist is a Christian, and he points out the fact that trees are often referred to in different ways in the Bible. For example, he talks about how psalm one compares a man who bases his life on God's law to a tree growing close to streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf doesn't wither. So I think also, too, sometimes we hear people talking about having a tree change.
In other words, they leave the cities and go and live in the countryside, where there's lots of trees. It's quite interesting when I think about the amazing design of trees and their structures. And he writes in this particular article, which he titled trees God's creative power on display.
And you could probably read this article, the full article, in creation.com. If you googled creation.com and probably did a search on trees, it'd probably come up.
But I found he used a very interesting illustration because he writes to help demonstrate the design, that trees are powerful evidence for supernatural design. He says, compare a tree with a skyscraper. And skyscrapers, of course, often seen as examples of human achievements.
In some of these countries we read about, this is the highest building in this particular continent, and so forth, are in this particular country. But he points out a skyscraper begins with a plan compiled by a team of architects and engineers. And even the very largest of trees begins with a tiny seed.
And some of these seeds are no bigger than a pinhead. But in that tiny little seed is crammed, complex, programmed information that controls the development into a giant living organism, the tree. And so is a code.
And he then uses the illustration. If you think of a skyscraper, it takes truckloads of material, such as cement and sand and steel. All have to be brought to the site to build the skyscraper.
But the tree accomplishes this buildup of its body, the root system, the trunk and the crown on site, just by utilising the raw materials surrounding it. So it uses water delivered by the rain, or from underground water coming. It uses the carbon dioxide that is present in the air and oxygen from the surrounding air.
And of course, truth produce oxygen and the nutrients that have been dispersed through the soil in the ground around its, its roots. And remember that tree, when that tiny little seed starts off and it shoots, little shoot comes out and begins to root. And then from that tiny little seed and those tiny, tiny little shoot, a huge tree can grow.
Now, when you think about building a skyscraper, you've got to have energy to run the cement mixes. Either they've got to use petrol energy from fossil fuel or electrical energy, often generated by fossil fuel or nuclear power. And then there's all the human energy that humans get from eating food to sort of then lay the bricks and pour the concrete and weld the steel frame and so forth.
Whereas in the case of the tree, the tree uses energy trapped by the sun by special organs in the trees called leaf. So when that little seed pops out, it already has information programmed, it has a little reserve of energy and chemicals, and it produces its own little solar energy caption device, a leaf. And so that first little shoot, that first little green leaf comes out, it then begins to capture the sun's energy and use that.
And Dr. Havell points out that these small, green, and mostly flat, leathery structures contain thousands of minute but highly sophisticated factories capable of capturing the solar energy and then converting it into the energy rich substances, the carbohydrates. And I think I've talked about in earlier talks about the amazing photosystem two, that is in plants.
Look up if you google photosystem two, it's amazing structure in plants that scientists are still trying to work out exactly how it works. When I was last reviewing the literature in this area, they were still uncertain how the water molecules are trapped in this little machine that actually converts the solar energy, and use the solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Some of the oxygen is released and the hydrogen is then combined with carbon dioxide to produce sugars and carbohydrates, which then help build the tree's structure, build its body and also provide energy.
And this process that we call photosynthesis, that's in that little tree, is really far superior. And Dr. Havel talks about this as well.
He says it's far superior to similar efforts that mankind, with all our universities and research institutes, has achieved so far. It utilises complex organic compounds and structures so miniaturised as to be invisible to the unaided eye, to produce high energy sugars. And when you think that evolutionists believe that this system totally arose by chance, I mean, how could the first system arise? How could the first system arise to capture this energy? How could it evolve to do that? Where would it get its energy from? And so there's so much evidence that evolution is absolutely impossible, that these amazing machines that we call trees, that provide so much, such a versatile building and construction material for us, for humans to know.
We build houses out of it. The first house that, well, the only house that I built actually framed it. I had lived in a little village in Tasmania where there were timber mills, and the timber was cut from a local tree and milled into the particular boards that I needed to build the frame.
It's interesting that the versatility of the timber. I remember you could nail it and it was so strong, it could bear so much weight, and yet it was so easy to work. Of course, I've seen programmes, too, where previously they would often build houses without using nails.
They would just cut these little bevelled type of slots and use different pins. And I forget the technical, the carpentry name for this particular building method, but without using any nails, you could build the frame of the house. And they were very strong.
And I remember watching a programme where they restructured a house that had been pulled to pieces and moved and then put it back together many years later. And, of course, trees fix this carbon dioxide, one of the waste products that a lot of people are very concerned about today, as we're burning so much fossil fuels, again, trees deal with this waste product so efficiently and in return, generate oxygen. I guess that's why I'm such a fan of trees.
I love trees and the different varieties of trees and the flowering trees. It's interesting that the tree structure is, again, just, in my view, amazing evidence of design. So the oxygen, for example, in the leaves are released through little access pores.
And these are the same pores that the carbon dioxide has actually taken in to the leaf and the crown of the tree, or the top of the tree, that has all of the leaves on the smaller branches. And we see that design, the curve there, designed to give the leaves maximum exposure to the sun. And every little photosynthesis cell in the leaves is connected to the rest of the tree by minute conducting channels.
And there's one set of channels called xylem, and that conducts water and dissolved chemicals upwards from the roots to the leaves. And the other set, called flem phloem, conducts the sugars produced in the leaves downward to the roots. And both types are formed within the tree from the sugars generated from the sunlight and then reconstituted into strong and more stable substances called cellulose and lingdin.
So when you think about, again, the design for all these little structures, all these little channels that carry these different compounds, the water up and the dissolved chemicals that are needed from the root system up, and then the others, the sugar and energy fuel for growing the tree down. And it's interesting. The xylem also has a structural function.
It helps give the tree branches and the trunk their strength so that they can support the weight of the crown and the xylem, these little channels that construct the water, also give the trunk of the tree the strength, so it can support the weight of the leaves, and also its stiffness, so it's not just easily pushed over. When you compare this with a skyscraper, the structure of a skyscraper is very rigid. So most human constructions of concrete and steel aren't flexible.
But the stiffness in a tree is actually flexible, enables its tree to bend a little bit and then regain its shape when, say, a strong wind stops. The phlegm as well has a couple of functions. So as well as conducting the flow of sugars downward, it protects the soft parts of the tree where new tissues are forming.
So it acts as an outer shield against mechanical and also fire damage. And I've often been fascinated by the root system of trees. Having had to dig out a few trees, they can be hard work.
The root system of a tree also has dual function. So it fairly obviously anchors it into the soil, but it also extracts water and nutrients from the soil. When it rains, some of the water directly enters through the leaf surfaces, but, of course, most ends up in the ground.
So a tree needs to get the water out of the ground. And so roots actively actually search. I guess they grow towards moisture areas, and they collect that water.
So that it can be utilised by the tree. The other thing, of course, is that tree roots protect the soil from erosion. And in non frozen soil, tree roots are continually growing and they respond to stimuli to grow downwards and towards moisture.
And apparently fungi and bacteria in the soil also play a role, working with the tree roots to maximise the uptake of nutrients. So that's why mulching trees not only protects the tree. When you're growing fruit trees in the garden, or even ornamental trees for that matter, mulching, of course, protects them from water loss in the soil, so much so there's more water for the tree, but also encourages the fungi and bacteria to grow.
And there's a whole synergy there that preserves the health of the soil. One of the things that often fascinated me is the fact that when you see a tree maybe 100 metres tall, 300ft high, some of the tallest trees are, the water has to be raised against gravity that high. And so when you think about it, 1 atm pressure is equivalent to about 34ft, or about ten metres.
And so trees actually get around this with quite an ingenious combination of cellular processes. And so when you think about it, for the whole codes to develop, to produce these, the function of a tree, to me, it's just overwhelming evidence for design. There had to be a designer.
And when we think of all the different varieties of trees, all with their different genetic codes, and we also have to remember that the codes are nothing like what the tree looks like itself. It's a code, just like we write the word in English, tr e e for tree, that doesn't look anything like a tree. It's a code that our mind translates to generate in our mind a picture of a tree.
And so all these aspects of the tree are in this cave. For me, trees that are all around us are such powerful evidence of creation. Another one that I came across just recently to another aspect, and I was reading an article about shrimp or prawns or lobster in Tasmania.
I used to catch a lot of crayfish down there, and I've only just learned that they're decapods, ten legged crustaceans, lobster, shrimp, crayfish. But one of the fascinating things is that they have amazing eyes. So our eyes use lenses to focus light by refraction and bending.
But these decapods used mirrors to reflect the light to a focus. And shrimps that live down at huge depths where there's not much light, have an amazing design involving photonic crystals or nanostructures that can manipulate light at the different wavelength levels. And I guess this is at the opposite end of the spectrum of trees, but we've got trees on the mountains high up.
We've got the shrimp that live right down at the bottom of the ocean there. And it's interesting that researchers have really only relatively recently analysed their eyes. There was an amazing article that came out in nature nanotechnology back on the 13 January in 2020.
And when they looked at this, they studied the eyes of the white leg shrimp. They found that the mirror comprises of an array of nanospheres of an average diameter, 330 nm. So that's smaller than the wavelength of visible light.
And these were packed into a regular pattern and that was wrapped around the bottom half of the light receptor. Now, these spheres were made up of eight to ten little concentric thin layers, totaling about 70 shell thickness surrounding a hollow core. And these layers were formed of plates of a chemical compound called iso xanthurin.
And this is quite an interesting substance because these spheres have a property called biofringence that means double refraction, where the amount of bending or the light or the refractive index varies with the direction. And in actual fact, along the circumference of this particular material, it's got a refractive index of 1.96, which is one of the highest refractive indexes of any biological material.
And it turns out that this material is just ideal, just absolutely perfect for reflecting light. And what it means is that these creatures that live right down the bottom part of the ocean, where there's not much light, get the maximum amount of light. And it's fascinating, you see, because this is another thing, just like our skyscrapers, with all our engineering and planning, in my view, can't compare with a tree that, again, builds itself in the location and is self replicating.
Skyscrapers aren't self replicating, but here, again, in this humble little shrimp that people think, sort of just a simple little creature down there, but its eyes are just so amazing and just perfectly designed and right for the job. And some of the researchers in the article refer to the genius of the shrimp solution of using this bifringent material. And of course, the usual scenario is that this thing evolved over millions of years.
But when you think about it, it's got to be in the DNA code. The DNA code has to use enzymes to make ISO xanthopterin, the compound that these lenses are made out of. The more and more that we look at these things, they're so amazing.
As a matter of fact, this particular article on the design of the eyes the researchers concluded this in their paper. They concluded this system offers inspiration for the design of photonic crystals constructed from spherically symmetric bifring of particles, for the use in ultra thin reflectives and as non iridescent pigments. In other words, as scientists study this, we come up with new ideas.
So we weren't able to invent something like this with all our intelligence. And yet we assume that random, blind, random mutations to dna produced this in just the right creature that just needed this in its dna. I think it's pretty obvious that there is overwhelming evidence for a supernatural creator behind all the living systems we experience.
And details of that creator are found in the Bible, the book that has been so substantiated by archaeology and history. And I think it's just so amazing, the evidence we have for a supernatural creator. And of course, the Bible tells us that this creator loves us very much and came to earth as Jesus Christ.
You've been listening to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton, and remember, if you want to relisten to this programme, just google 3abnaustralia.org.au and click on the listen button.
Have a great day.
You've been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio.
