I don't know if our pastor sensed that his description of God as craftsman was meeting a certain tide of skepticism, but no matter...He walked over to the altar and picked up a flower from the vase.
"Look at the beauty of a flower. The Bible tells us that even Solomon in all his glory was never arrayed as one of these. And do you know what? Not a single person in the world can tell us what makes a flower bloom. All those scientists in their laboratories, the ones who can split the atom and build jet planes and televisions, well, not one of them can tell you how a plant makes flowers." and why should they be able to? "Flowers, just like you, are the work of God."
I was impressed. No one argued, no one wisecracked. We filed out of the church like good little boys and girls, ready for our First Communion the next day. And I never thought of it again, until this symposium on developmental biology. Sandwiched between two speakers working on more fashionable topics in animal development was Elliot M. Meyerowitz, a plant scientist at Caltech...I sat there with an ear-to-ear grin on my face...Meyerowitz, you see, had explained how plants made flowers.
The four principal parts of a flower...are actually modified leaves. This is one of the reasons why plants can produce reproductive cells just about anywhere...Plants can produce new flowers anywhere they can grow new leaves. Somehow, however, the plant must find a way to "tell" an ordinary cluster of leaves that they should develop into floral parts. That's where Meyerowitz's lab came in.
Several years of patient genetic study had isolated a set of mutants that could form only two or three of the four parts. By crossing the various mutants. his team was able to identify four genes that have to be turned on or off in a specific pattern to produce a normal flower. Each of these genes, in turn, sets of a series of signals that "tell" the cells of a brand-new bud to develop as sepals or petals rather than ordinary leaves. The details are remarkable, and the interactions between the genes are fascinating. To me...the scientific details were just the icing on the cake. The real message was, "Father Murphy, you were wrong." God doesn't make a flower. The floral induction genes do.
Miller K "Finding Darwin's God" (Harper 2007) p 260-262
