How Could Plants Evolve? Answer: They Evolved

Darwinism has replaced the need for demonstration in science with the convenience of assertion.

When you read papers and articles that offer to explain how something evolved, what you often find are statements that they just evolved. Let’s see some examples.

3D Body Evolution: Adding a New Dimension to Colonize the Land (Current Biology). The title suggests that readers will learn something about ‘3D Body Evolution’ in the case of plants about to colonize the land. One might anticipate learning about transitional forms, mutations, and natural selection. What the paper presents, however, is just a collection of assertions that plants did evolve.

• Complex multicellular plant bodies evolved in both generations of land plants.
• From unicellular organisms, multicellularity evolved multiple independent times in diverse eukaryotic lineages.
• Within some lineages, ‘complex’ mutlicellularity [sic], defined by the three-dimensional (3D) organization of the body plan, evolved from simple multicellular ancestors.
• Land plants represent one example, with both generations (haploid and diploid) evolving complex mutlicellularity [sic].
• The study highlights the importance of the CLV pathway for the morphological innovation of 3D body development in land plants and opens a new avenue to approach a mechanistic understanding of the evolution of the 3D patterning of a multicellular body during land plant evolution.

Is that it? Surely there must be some empirical data to back up these assertions. All that the authors put forward, though, is a simplistic story about how certain complex enzyme pathways affecting the change from 2-D to 3-D patterning might have evolved in one species of moss, Physcomitrella. They are called CLAVATA (CLV) pathways, and they involve multiple complex protein parts.

In summary, Whitewoods et al. found that the land plant-specific CLV peptide/receptor-like kinase pathway regulates orientations of cell division planes during developmental transitions from 2D to 3D growth in Physcomitrella. They also report that a novel CLV function found in the Physcomitrella gametophyte body in regulating cell division planes is conserved in flowering plant sporophyte bodies.

There’s no evolution here. There is a complex pathway in a moss that is “conserved in flowering plants.” The short paper mentions nothing about natural selection. The only mutations mentioned damage things; they don’t invent new things. The paper’s summary promises, “A new study demonstrates that CLAVATA3-like peptides function via conserved receptors in Physcomitrella patens as key molecules for morphological innovation of 3D growth in land plants.” But search for how it does that, and you find no such innovation. They end by claiming that the “new avenue to approach the understanding of the evolution of the 3D patterning of a multicellular body” has been demonstrated. It sounds like an advertisement for vaporware or futureware has snookered the customer. Clearly, if evolutionists are only on an “avenue” by which they hope to “approach” understanding, they ain’t got no understanding yet. Their false confidence is founded on prior belief in “land plant evolution.” How did plants evolve? They evolved.

Getting to the root of plant evolution (Science Daily). This press release from the University of Oxford actually offers an alleged transitional form. Here comes the promise:

Despite plants and vegetation being key to the Earth’s ecosystem, little is known about the origin of their roots. However in new research, published in Nature, Oxford University scientists describe a transitional root fossil, from the earliest land ecosystem, that sheds light on how roots have evolved. 

Darwinists to the rescue. More will be known! One thing, though, is “known” from the outset: roots “have evolved.” When you already think you know the answer, and no other answers are permitted, can you really know anything? Yes: by the power of suggestion.

The findings suggest that plant roots have evolved more than once, and that the characteristics of roots developed in a step-wise manner – with the central root organ evolving first. And the root cap subsequently coming later.

Since we already know by fiat that roots evolved, we are not surprised to compound miracles. Roots evolved more than once! Presto. Now, about the step-wise manner, which would appear to support Darwin’s vision. Evidence for this comes from one fossil: a club moss that (according to evolutionists) branched off early in the evolution of land plants. A fossil of a club moss shows a meristem (emerging root or stem) without root hairs or a cap. From this one instance, a grand scenario takes root:

The paper’s conclusion suggests that these roots are a transitional step towards modern-style, rooted vascular plants. The findings support the idea that, as this cap-less transitional structure appears in a plant that is already a lycopsid, roots with caps evolved separately in lycopsids and euphyllophytes from their common, root-less ancestors.

Whatever this club moss lacked, it survived quite well, even if the Darwinians can be sure it lacked delicate root hairs in a fossil. Can the appearance of all land plants be deduced from a tiny fossil of one club moss? Every part of this story invokes the assumption of evolution. How did club mosses evolve? They evolved. How did plants evolve? They evolved.

This is the kind of snow job that is turning vast numbers of students away from God and toward Darwinism. With grand bluffing, glittering generalities and the power of suggestion, students are led down a primrose path to absurdity. Professing to be wise, they have become fools. Professing to be scientific, they have become converts to the cult of Darwin. Bits of fossils are used as shiny pendulums to hypnotize them into thinking “Thisssss issss scienccccccce” while the teacher drugs them into euphoria about how much better they feel now that they have kicked out “religion” and that nasty old God of the Bible they might have learned about as kids.

But this is not the experimental science of Joule or Faraday. It is a new Aristotelianism taught with authoritarianism. Plants evolved because it is their nature to evolve. Since the student now ‘knows’ that plants evolved (because that is their nature), wee bits of data work as props to illustrate the dogma. It’s deductive science, not inductive empiricism. Premise: plants evolved. Question: How did plants evolve? Deduction: plants evolved. Yes, there are difficulties, like Darwin’s Abominable Mystery (the origin of flowering plants), but no worries. The students already know the answer. Plants evolved. Even if structures had to evolve multiple times independently to fit the picture, they can believe any imaginative scenario—even multiple miracles—now that the answer is already a given.