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| Before Virginia became overpopulated with White-tailed Deer, the author was able to grow an abundance of yellow daylilies.In 2024, these plants demonstrated their will to live, despite
being fed upon continuously by deer, by trying to regrow leaves—and in the end,
a single blossom—in an unsuccessful effort to perpetuate their kind. |
Evolution is a complex explanation of how life forms have changed over time. A common misconception is that it informs us of how life began on Earth, but it does not.
What it does do is explain how populations of organisms become modified
over generations, leading to a diversity of organisms, some of which can be
quite different from their original ancestors. The driving force behind this
biological concept is known as natural selection.
The biological
unit of heredity that can change how an individual looks, behaves, and/or how
its body works, is known as a “gene”. At its simplest, evolution is about
adaptation to one’s environment by way of gene mutations that allow helpful
survival traits to be passed on to subsequent generations. It’s a wonderful manner
in which to perpetuate life as environmental transformations occur on a physically evolving
planet. Of course, it means that the planet is changing biologically as
well.
Some folks would
argue that the interconnectedness of organisms, as—for example—in the
dependence of flowers upon pollinators such as bees to help them reproduce, speaks
to “spontaneous creation”. The fallacy here arises due to folks making the
mistake of looking at the world as it is today, and assuming it has
always been the same. It hasn’t.
Evolution—which
fossils corroborate—is the process of life forms going from simple to more
complicated. Thus, the first plants were not flowering plants dependent upon
insects, but ferns and other primitive plants that could reproduce themselves by
self-developed spores.
By the time the
much more-intricate flowering plants arrived on the scene, insects not as advanced as bees—such as flies and beetles—existed that could pollinate them. Although
bees get the lion’s share of the credit for pollination by insects, numerous
other kinds of these creatures assist flowering plants to reproduce, even to
this day.
To many people,
perhaps especially scientists, evolution killed God. However, this view is
wrong, as shown by this treatise. The natural world works perfectly and
logically, its function being
to perpetuate life in all its wondrous diversity of forms.
Indeed, a life force
(which can be described as a push or pull upon an object) exists inside every
organism, pushing or pulling it in various directions throughout its life. Unlike
in physics, where a force is an external agent capable of impacting a
body, the life force is an internal agent comprising
an extremely strong will to live.
My decades of careful
nature observations have revealed to me the stubbornness of this force. I’ve
witnessed how animals, and even plants, fight to live, even when death—so
seemingly feared by all—is inevitable.
The poet, Dylan
Thomas, wrote:
Old
age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage,
rage against the dying of the light.
[https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46569/do-not-go-gentle-into-that-good-night]
But my mother’s experience tells me differently. I don’t believe there is a “dying of the light”, and I hope you won’t either. I don’t believe the life force within each and every organism is extinguished, but rather that it continues on in the universe. Do not fear death; my mom didn’t, and now, neither do I. We are simply “going Home”.
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| After a summer of continuous feeding by deer upon the daylilies in the author’s yard, these plants—that could not maintain leaf growth to sustain themselves—began to bloom (almost stemless) in mid-fall. It was a last-ditch effort to perpetuate life, should they die, by making seeds. But with cold temperatures and few, if any pollinators active, the plants’ valiant efforts were in vain, though clearly illustrating the life force within that does not surrender easily. |
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