Plants and trees and flowers Page 1 of 2

How on earth do trees support themselves. No idea , but trees don’t just pounce out of the ground willy-nilly. Do plants and trees and flowers know what they are doing. I don’t mean that they themselves know , but am thinking in the same vain of does even our body know what it is doing to have a heart and lungs etc. We ourselves , that is the we in us , that we think that we are, doesn’t make the heart and lungs and so the actual tree most likely doesn’t make all of it’s parts like roots and leaves either.

But in some sense the tree would have to have known before it itself existed that there was now available at some point millions of years ago , air with carbon in it that it could use to become a physical wooden tree. That in simplicity , we could say , is two phenomenas. That is , the air with carbon in it and a tree. Would evolution have a role in either.

So from there , trees surely didn’t have to fathom it all out by relying on something like our evolution idea. Compare it to like some human structural engineer putting a garden fence into the ground that can stay standing up in all sorts of weather. Imagine the mathematics to have a root system that even if it knew what soil was and how heavy soil was , it would have to come up with the exact tanglyness to support itself. Stand next to a tree and you can feel the enormity of its strength. It could perhaps support the weight of two trees. Once again though in the main , our conjecture of random mutations and natural selection seems futile to explain the existence and success of trees. It just seems like the tree is ensured to have the ability to support itself.

If when we look at trees we might try to imagine how they evolved since they at one time did not exist. If we used random mutations and natural selection to explain them then there would have been a time when the trees had reached a certain height and because of their weight some would have toppled over. Then natural selection would allow the trees that didn’t topple over to go on and produce more trees that didn’t fall down. There would have been a point at which a tree could grow no taller. Different types of trees seem to know how far down their roots can go down in the soil that they are in to be able to take water and nutrients all the way up the trunk. That is a process. So as well as having a process and arranging the leaves to soak up the sunlight and a million other things, we surely cannot be satisfied that random mutations and natural selection is responsible for any of that.

This newly emerging maple tree has an arrangement of equally spaced branches and leaves. Again surely natural selection has nothing to do with that spacing. Those branches each go in opposite directions to the branches above or below .Hard to think how evolution theory explains that spacing and it’s eventual hundred feet height. Since this picture it has grown lots of other branches in between the lowest and highest ones.

What’s quite remarkable though , is that the seed that started it all is gone. What does that mean. Don’t know. But given the right conditions this young tree will continue to grow without the seed that started it all.

There is a sort of dichotomy of thought that we can have about say just the spacing of the stems that grow into thick branches that spread out on the tree. Firstly , the tree somehow does that and natural selection is supposed to allow the most successful trees to make more trees. Second would be that the tree does that and doesn’t rely on natural selection at all.

Isn’t it more likely that that the actual tree or species of tree , that can soak up carbon from the air to make itself , would surely be more in charge to evolve, if it ever did . The tree takes carbon from the air to make itself. It then makes seeds that make more of itself. Take the acorn that the oak tree produces that can grow into another oak tree. The acorn has the ability to turn into an oak tree. We could conjecture away about the acorn having an ability and write a 300 page book with all sorts of imaginary theories about this ability. By far though , the weakest conjecture would be that the acorn evolved using random mutations and natural selection.

Just on the whole tree , you’d firstly have to have the unphysical phenomena of a tree. Why then would the physical tree that comes about need evolution when the tree has come about because of the unphysical phenomena of itself. Take just the leaves. The leaves that are on the tree take the carbon from the air. It’s hard to think that the leaves were brought about by evolution. It would follow that evolution doesn’t make leaves and that evolution also doesn’t make the tree trunk and evolution also doesn’t make the roots either. Our evolution theory is about natural selection acting on random mutations in the physical tree , but somehow that conjecture leaves in our thoughts that the tree came from something less evolved than it is today.

Back on just the trees supporting themselves though. It might though be more of a balancing act for them to be supported. If the bottom of the main trunk is bearing down on the soil and that soil takes most of the weight then any tilt in the tree is pressing down on the roots that stops it moving left or right , very much like a tightrope walker trapeze artist walking on a piece of rope. But not quite.

Surprisingly , tree roots don’t go deep into the earth, like i myself first had imagined. They seem to have some that go say six feet under the main trunk but most of them spread out sideways after say one to six feet and they they can extend wider than the width of the whole tree in all directions. They seem to know that it is futile to go too deep as they will eventually meet rocks or more dence soil.

It’s a wonder how say in a forest all the trees seem to get on with each other. They can be very close to each other. Their roots must mingle or move around each others roots. There is of course some distance between those trees. Reminds me of the birds you see on the top of those high street lights where they have a six foot arms out structure at the top with the lights on either side. The birds are always evenly spaced. Then when another bird joins them one of the other birds flies away. They are obviously spaced out that way to be able to fly away and not knock into each other on take off. Obviously with the trees though they are subjected by space and and those that do manage to grow , grow to a whole. So even in a dense forest they become a whole tree even if their branches mingle a bit with other trees.

Mentioned earlier that trees must know about gravity to be able to have a root system to support themselves. They would also all have to know about the wind and rain and soil and rocks etc. When the roots hit rocks they spread wider. The little seed has to get those roots to be able to support maybe tonnes of weight in a few years time. Those roots have to be in place before that extra weight is added. If the weight was added before the necessary roots , the tree would topple over. They know what to do even on the slope of a hill. They still grow upwards and the roots grow downwards despite which part of our round planet earth they are on. And they rarely fail. You never see a tree that has toppled over unless an extraordinary weather event occurs.

Evolution theory would still be allowing trees to grow higher and higher and trees would be falling down every day all over the place. It just doesn’t happen. Trees and plants don’t ever exceed their limits in terms of height and weight. There can be no evolution involved in that. Failures would be occurring everywhere and we don’t ever see it.

There are those ideas that todays living animals started off small from out of simple molecules coming together millions of years ago somehow from chemical reactions to go on to produce the rest of life. Trees seem to be a bit different from life. Looking at them it’s hard to imagine that they don’t know what they are doing. Messy. Can’t remember thought. Maybe it was that they never started that way and neither did life.

All of the trees are made of the carbon taken from the air. Somehow the seed gets the sun to split the carbon out of the air from the other properties in the air and that tree somehow sucks up that carbon out of the air up through the leaves over the whole of its life and the tree grows. The grass and all other plants and flowers do the same. It’s almost like trees and plants exist to take the carbon from the air to make the air perfectly breathable for animals. More conjecture of course. But today we are talking about climate change and carbon capture. So the trees and plants have been capturing carbon for us for millions of years and it’s no wonder that we are wondering about what happens when we release all that carbon back into the air.

We can watch time lapse videos of plants and flowers that show them growing into whole flowers in say 30 seconds. Not so easy with trees. But it leaves the thought when seeing those plants and flowers growing quickly in the videos that even if they have evolved to be what they are , they wouldn’t use evolution to do it. If the conjecture made above that trees exist to make the air liveable for life has any fact in it , then the trees that sort of have a job to do wouldn’t rely on evolution. That is that once upon a time there were no trees but the air needed something to capture the carbon to make it more breathable. If that were the case then the tree would just come into existence. The tree that is going to capture the carbon wouldn’t need to mess around evolving itself. That of course would mean that every substance including life just comes into existence.

That’s a bit of of problem in thinking. We only have to think of a dandelion popping up in the spring or a rose bush also popping up it’s roses every year and know that our thoughts of evolution are almost not necessary. Evolution would have to be involved with making them firstly occur and then occur once a year to do all sorts of things in different seasons. We sort of give the trees and flowers a secondary process outside of what they are to make them exist. They exist , and then we say they have the imaginary process of evolution acting on them.

It was once thought that a tree must have taken food in from the soil from its roots to make it so big. But some had a think and thought that if that was the case then there would be a great big hole in the ground as there would be hardly any soil left and the tree would fall down. So some wondered and grew trees in big pots and only fed them water. They noticed that the soil was still the same amount but the tree still grew. They and we might think magic. Now we know it’s that photosynthesis thing. Billions of tiny particles of carbon taken from the air with the help of sunlight and absorbed through the leaves to solidify into tree trunks and daffodils and rose bushes and then oranges and apples etc. Simple as that. It isn’t of course.

But on the main theme .. Surely something like our ideas of natural selection or random mutations couldn’t be involved with this. Google searches on just trees say that they have evolved ways to protect themselves. No explanations or real proof at all. Absolutely none. They do though protect themselves. A layer of bark on the outside of the tree and the leaves have lots of poisonous chemicals to ward off insects. Then like say a rose or holly or bramble bush there are thorns and thistles. All of this protection is said to have evolved through random mutations and natural selection.

But using the the word evolution and the thought that they evolved seems misleading. They surely have thorns and poisons to protect themselves because thorns and poisons will do the job. Having to naturally select thorns and poisons from goodness knows what else , would have left the plant or tree vulnerable from the start. Some writers though also often use the word ‘adapted’ which allows more freedom in how we would think about how say plants or trees in a dry dessert have all the qualities to retain water. Adapted at least leaves room to think that we don’t know how. Using the word evolved on the other hand carries with it the words random mutations and natural selection and that we do know how , even though we don’t.

Just on the plants in the desert. Some types exist that don’t survive the year. They wilt away in the sun but what they do quickly is make some seeds while they have time. The plants are gone but they have left their seeds. There is no natural selection going on with that. They know to get those seeds out quick. They surely could not have been naturally selected as the first ones wouldn’t have known that they themselves only last 3 months. Same as some insects that live for only a few days. They hatch and almost immediately search out a partner to make babies.

But just on some plants in dry regions like cactuses that use water in the way that they do , it again seems futile to imagine that they relied on random mutations and natural selection to do what they do. It doesn’t seem likely that the cactus in the desert evolved from trees or plants that lived in the past in wetter conditions. Even substituting the word ‘evolved’ to ‘adapted’ leaves a complete void as we’d have to have then the ‘theory of adaptation’.

Remember stinging nettles. They still exist. But how do they know how to make a chemical that stings us like a snake has a venom to paralyze it’s prey. The word evolved blocks all thought. It sort of feels satisfying to use it. It’s as if that is good enough to explain the above and the next.

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