Have you ever followed a bee around the garden, watching it enter flowers and lick up the nectar? Many flowers need bees for pollination, and bees need the flowers for nectar. These two creatures, plant and animal, need each other, and both would die out if it were not for the mutual services of the other.
The whole planet's biosphere is designed in this way, in a maze of complicated interactions, like one enormous machine. ?Biodiversity?, or 'the web of life? are names given to this interlocking interdependence, yet how many people consider its origin? Plants ?fix? nitrogen from the air, and add it to the soil; bacteria decompose humus, along with the help of worms and other recyclers of plant material. Humus feeds the plants, which also provide shelter and food to other creatures. Even the humble fungus is crucial to the planet's health.
Mycorrhizal (my-cor-rize-al) fungi have a mutually beneficial relationship with plants. As many as 90% interact with either general fungi, or specialized fungi. These fungi enable plants to obtain nutrients that would otherwise be insufficiently available ? the plants in turn provide carbohydrates for the fungi.
Because each plant or animal supplies . . .
Have you ever followed a bee around the garden, watching it enter flowers and lick up the nectar? Many flowers need bees for pollination, and bees need the flowers for nectar. These two creatures, plant and animal, need each other, and both would die out if it were not for the mutual services of the other.
The whole planet's biosphere is designed in this way, in a maze of complicated interactions, like one enormous machine. ?Biodiversity?, or 'the web of life? are names given to this interlocking interdependence, yet how many people consider its origin? Plants ?fix? nitrogen from the air, and add it to the soil; bacteria decompose humus, along with the help of worms and other recyclers of plant material. Humus feeds the plants, which also provide shelter and food to other creatures. Even the humble fungus is crucial to the planet's health.
Mycorrhizal (my-cor-rize-al) fungi have a mutually beneficial relationship with plants. As many as 90% interact with either general fungi, or specialized fungi. These fungi enable plants to obtain nutrients that would otherwise be insufficiently available ? the plants in turn provide carbohydrates for the fungi.
Because each plant or animal supplies a certain range of benefits to the whole system, there is some overlapping of services. This is why quite a lot of damage can be done to the environment without causing complete collapse. Many businesses use the same technique, by training their staff in several areas of the business, so if one member fails to show up, other staff can fill in.
But there is far more to the biosphere than a large number of integrated systems. It is also built in hierarchical layers, levels of relationships and interchanging complexities. This ?layering? of services starts in the overall system which includes the sun, moon and planets, and goes down through many complexities to the balance of gasses in the atmosphere, through to the humidifiers and water-purifying systems in forests and over land masses, to the circulation of ocean currents, to the hydrologic cycle in which evaporation from the sea leads to condensation over land and rain, to water-storage in the poles . . . through layer after layer, until we come at last to the interaction between non-living systems and living creatures, then on through to the cellular systems in which individual molecules are shaped to do specific jobs, through to the whole system of chemical bonding, positive and negative ions, and even further than that, to the balancing and sizes of atoms and their constituents. At any and all levels we find integration and balance, mutual dependency and mutual benefit.
A most logical question is now being asked: how did multiple organisms live independently of the services they now need to survive? It may be a simple matter to explain how some creatures became mutually dependent, but it is impossible to explain how the entire Earth became so multi-dependent. By way of illustrating this point, let us assume that it might be possible for two parts of a car to fall together by accident, but not a whole car. The arrival of a car by accident is beyond possibility ? yet many people assume that the whole biosphere grew gradually from nothing ? that all the parts lived independently of each other, and then just ?fell together?.
Evolutionists like to point at such things as cannibalism, wanton destruction by some creatures, death, and decay as evidence of a biosphere which is still forming, but these are actually strong evidences for a process which is going the other way. A good biosphere going bad.
The Bible describes a series of creative acts by God, in which the whole Earth was completed. God said this finished work was 'very good?, but soon after He created humans, they rebelled against Him. Because they sinned God punished them, and altered the creation they were intended to rule over, bringing in a process of degeneration that we are all familiar with. Breakdowns in the biosphere support the Bible account because they all head in one direction ? downhill. Depletion of species, and general decline of biodiversity are the only processes Man has ever recorded.
It is clear that life on Earth makes life possible, and that ecosystems had to be assembled very quickly or they would not exist.
Richard Gunther, Copyright 2005