The Venus Flytrap Takes a Bite Out of Darwinism

Intelligent Design the Future

Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture

Science, Philosophy, Astronomy, Society & Culture, Life Sciences

4 • 993 Ratings

🗓️ 17 February 2023

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On this ID the Future from the vault, Andrew McDiarmid reads from Marcos Eberlin’s fascinating book Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose. In this excerpt, the distinguished Brazilian scientist highlights the challenge the Venus flytrap poses for evolutionary theory. Dr. Eberlin describes the problem: The Venus flytrap, like all carnivorous plants, has no use for its insect-trapping function unless it also has an insect-digesting function. And vice versa. But the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection selects for current function, not potential future function. Unlike a designing intelligence, natural selection can’t look into the future and plan in that way. So for natural selection to have selected these twin systems, they would somehow have had to evolve together. Read More ›

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0:00.0	Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
0:16.0	Greetings, I'm Andrew McDermott. I appreciate you tuning in.
0:18.0	Today I'm reading another excerpt from the book, Forsight,
0:21.0	how the chemistry of life reveals planning and purpose by Renner. the Sciences, one of the prestigious Thompson Medal, and former President of the International
0:34.9	Mass Spectrometry Society.
0:37.6	He has published close to a thousand scientific articles.
0:40.8	His recent book, Forsight, has been endorsed by three Nobel Prize winners and is definitely worth a read.
0:47.0	You may have seen them up close and personal, or watched how they work in slow motion in those nature films on TV.
0:54.0	The Venus Fly Trap is a remarkable plant that features a mechanism that appears to be irreducibly complex.
1:01.0	So has it been analysed yet from a design perspective?
1:04.0	In fact, Dr Eberlin has done just that in his book Forsight.
1:09.0	What follows is Eberlin's discussion.
1:12.0	Carnivorous plants are intriguing, bizarre, and hard not to love at first sight.
1:18.0	These plants use an arsenal of masterfully engineered moving traps, chemical and electrical sensors, and
1:25.0	digestive chemicals to kill and consume spiders, insects, protozones, crustaceans, lizards,
1:32.0	mice, rats, and various other small invertebrates and vertebrates.
1:37.0	Each of these carnivorous plants manages all this using lures and a trap device, along with a mechanism and an arsenal of chemicals to facilitate
1:46.0	full digestion of the prey.
1:48.9	As Aaron Ellison and Nicholas Gotelli note, Charles Darwin pioneered modern research on carnivorous plants with his
1:55.9	1875 work in Sectivorous plants. There Darwin applied his idea of homology, which modern evolutionary biologists call homoplasy,
2:07.0	to highlight what he saw as evolutionary convergence across apparently unrelated taxa, and he was the first to provide descriptions of the structures that eight genera of plants used to entrap insects.
2:20.0	As Darwin reported, these plants are impressive not only for being able to capture prey,
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