The Teacher

The Teacher: Part III Day of Declaration, Chapter 52

CHAPTER 52

I'D GONE FOR A WALK IN THE MIDDLE of the afternoon on a Sabbath in early October and feeling tired, sat down under a maple grove near a stream. The warm sun was filtered through the characteristically shaped three-pointed leaves, painted in rich fall colors—deep burnt shades of rust, soft sunset yellows, and crisp singed crimson. I closed my eyes to bask in the comfort of the calm moment, close to nature—close to my Creator, when I heard something whirr past my ear. Opening my eyes, I saw the amazing sight of seeds falling from the leaf clusters where they'd developed.

When the wind caught them just right they turned into toy helicopters, their single wing spinning feverishly generating aerodynamic lift to carry them as far from the mother maple as possible. I'd studied enough biology to know the reason for the adaptation. A seedling would have a better chance to grow to maturity if it germinated in a sunny spot, not right under the shaded canopy of the tree where it was born. I couldn't help but be humbled by the evidence of intelligent design, clearly pointing to a Steve-Jobs super brain behind the tree's invention.

We think of being able to make and use tools as the hallmark of our intelligence. Of course, other animals also use them as well. Man copied the bird's wing and made airplanes, but how did a tree copy a bird's wing, and know that only one wing was needed, and attach it to a seed in just the right way to accomplish the demanding task of getting the seed far from the tree? Other trees use other adaptations to help their seeds disburse successfully.

Cottonwood seeds use the hot-air-balloon method—their soft fuzzy puffballs get caught in the wind and can be carried a long way from its tree of origin. The oak partners with an animal species, the squirrel, who will pick up the acorns that fall right under the tree, carry them off, and plant them far from the mother tree. Getting back to the maple's helicopter seeds, they don't all work just right! Was the maple learning, like a student in school?

First of all, the tree needed to plan ahead to make sure that the seeds that form in pairs, like two Siamese twins joined at their seed heads, split apart one at a time before falling, or the helicopter assist would not work. Before long I saw a gopher scurrying along the branches. He paused at a seed cluster and filled his pouches with seeds minus the Boeing 747 wings. Clearly the seeds were nourishing, but would some of them end up being carried far from the tree and have a chance to germinate in the spring? Mesmerized by all these possibilities, I paused to consider what this display of high-level problem solving might mean.

For the maple, it looks like a lot of hit-and-miss, but for the strategy to be successful the mother tree only has to have one seed successfully take root and thrive during its lifetime to insure that its DNA, its genetic blueprint is passed on to the next generation.

A scientist would explain such adaptations with the theory of Darwinian natural selection, all based on random chance mutations, but I preferred to believe that the tree was intelligent and could actually plan its own adaptations, like a human might gather wood for a fire. Perhaps God chose to imbed the tree's intelligence in the process of guided natural selection. Imagine cutting into a tree trunk and finding a Rolex. Would any reasonable person come to the conclusion that the tree grew the watch?

The point is simply that it's highly unlikely that a maple seed, with a one perfectly-designed Boeing 747 wing attached to it, could end up that way by a series of mindless random mutations.

WATCHING THE SEEDS HELICOPTER AWAY from the tree, one by one, sometimes in small squadrons of two or three, became hypnotic and I soon fell asleep opening a dream channel for Gloriana to send me information about what was coming. An initial serene stream of landscape images began to slowly began to speed up and become more and more disturbing.