Cottonwood Seeds: All You Need to Know

As we all know, this is the season for cottonwood trees to produce seed and send it on its way. Millions upon millions of the ubiquitous fluffy white puff balls float ephemerally in the air, bouncing and waving and drifting with every puff of wind. Each of them is a one-inch cotton candy sphere of see-through webbing, and each contains a tiny dense white seed. When a cottonwood seed sphere lands where it can find water, abundant sunlight, and nourishing soil, it can sprout into a new cottonwood tree and become mature over time.

Clearly the purpose of these seed carriers, which stack up in every crevice in the landscape for three to four weeks during the month of June and litter the ground like a light snowfall, is to transport the seeds of a cottonwood tree for a considerable distance away from the parent tree. Why is that necessary? Because the cottonwood tree is a massive, heavily-leafed monolith that can reach heights of 150 feet and shades everything beneath its massive branches for up to forty yards in diameter. Cottonwood seeds require an abundance of water and sunlight to prosper; those that fall beneath the parent tree rarely receive sufficient light and they die shortly after germination.

Other plants have mechanisms for distributing their seeds over a long distance as well. For example, a common sight in Minnesota in the spring and early summer is thousands of tiny “helicopters,” seed pods that have an extended wing with a concave scoop that twirls the pod around and around on the capricious winds and sends them a good distance away from the parent tree. Thistles have Velcro-like round seed balls that cling voraciously to the fur of passing animals and are thus transported to a place many leagues hence where they drop onto the ground, perhaps to find compatible soil, sun, and water for germination.

To me, this is all the proof that is necessary to demonstrate that Darwinism is hogwash.

Darwinism postulates a mindless, purposeless, random series of mutations that improve the organism and are passed on genetically to its descendants. In order to categorically deny the existence of an intelligence which plans, creates, and fosters the development of any organism, be it algae or tree or ape or human, Darwinism absolutely demands purposelessness. It is impossible in a Darwinian framework for an organism to plan a mutation that furthers its species.

So, back to the cottonwood. Here is a massive specimen, dutifully forming and dropping seeds by the hundreds of thousands each year. But they all fall under the tree, and being heavily shaded, they fail to germinate or prosper. If a fortunate few do bounce off a rock and fall a yard or two away from the huge tree, they may find nurturing soil and actually grow into a seedling. Alas, when they are but a year or two old, the parent tree’s habit of sucking up all the available ground water and spreading deep shade over sun-loving seedlings is deadly, and the young trees die.

Now, according to Darwinism, the parent tree does the equivalent of thinking. “Hmmmm,” it ponders. “This isn’t working. I need to mutate in order to perpetuate my species. How can I do that? What to do, what to do?” The tree mulls over several possibilities before settling on the ingenious device of a floating web sphere which will utilize the breeze as a means of moving the precious seed to a place where the parent won’t kill it.

Obviously this can’t happen because the parent tree has no consciousness. As such, not only can it not form an understanding as to the impeding demise of its species, it could never purposefully think up a solution to the problem. In truth, the parent tree has no sense whatsoever of anything outside itself, and that not a cognitive impulse but only genetic patterning. Perpetuation of its species is a phenomenon that mankind observes, not a concept embodied in unfeeling, inert wood.

Darwinists will counter with “But over many thousands of generations, trying mutation after mutation, the cottonwood discovers a workable solution!” Again, trees do not have minds to recognize a problem and attempt solutions. Besides, without the cottonwood seed spheres, the species chokes itself out of existence in one generation.

There is only one way that cottonwoods could have seed spheres and maples could have helicopters: an intelligence that planned it that way and created the first seeds with the mechanism for perpetuation within them. That intelligence, my dear Darwinist friends, is God. Read Genesis chapters one and two for details.

Posted by Hale Meserow
June 23, 2009