lpetrich

This is an example that is more accessible for everyday observation than chromosome details, though plants are relatively distant from our species.

Flowers have four kinds of parts growing from their stems: sepals, petals, stamens, and carpels (pistil parts). Sepals are very obviously leaflike, petals are somewhat less leaflike, and the resemblance is much less for stamens and carpels. I will be concerned with petals here, since they are the most prominent parts of flowers.

Plant leaves have a great variety of shapes, but each species of plant has some characteristic shape of leaf. And not only do flower petals tend to look like leaves, they tend to look like the rest of the leaves on the individual plant.

If one wishes to know where to start in recognizing leaf shapes, one may start with the monocot-dicot division of the flowering plants.

Dicots have:
Two seed leaves (cotyledons)
Leaves that can be broad
Branching, netlike pattern of leaf veins
Fourfold or fivefold flower symmetry

Monocots have:
One seed leaf (cotyledon)
Leaves that are usually narrow
Parallel leaf veins
Threefold or sixfold flower symmetry

And the most interesting similarity of all is that dicot petals tend to look like dicot leaves and monocot petals like monocot leaves. Compare a petunia (dicot) with a tiger lily (monocot) and the petal-leaf similarity should be very evident.

Now if individual species had been specially created, why did their creator(s) limit themselves to matching leaves and petals? Why did they never produce a flowering plant with dicot leaves and monocot petals? Or monocot leaves and dicot petals?

Would this be a reasonable challenge for creationists?

Doubting Didymus

Could be: God is mysterious, and we mere humans can never know His Marvellous Plan for dicotlydons.

Or: Just as god created us superior to all living things, he created some other species to be superior to others. Dicotlydons are obviously created by god to be superior to monocotlydons (they have many significant advantages that monocots do not have). Because of this, god would be justified in making mono- and dicots noticably different. He is enforcing the holy order of things. Putting a dicot flower on a monocot would be a travesty, like if god put a mans head on a monkeys body.

See? evolutionists can do nothing to the armoured juggernaut that is creationist thought patterns.

Dr.GH

You might also consider working in the following:
<a href="http://unisci.com/stories/20012/0615015.htm" target="_blank">http://unisci.com/stories/20012/0615015.htm</a>

MrDarwin

No, it wouldn't be a reasonable challenge because it's starting with several erroneous premises.

The petals of a flower very often (I would say usually) bear little resemblance to the leaves of the same plant. (Think of a rose.) Furthermore, there are several "primitive" dicots that have flowers that are very similar to those of monocots. "Primitive" dicots either have floral parts in indeterminate numbers, or have their floral parts arranged in 3's. Moreover, "primitive" monocots have broad leaves with netted veins, much like those of dicots.

This all makes perfect sense, not because these things were individually created, but because monocots evolved from early dicots (making dicots an unnatural (paraphyletic) group). Unfortunately, the traditional dichotomous classification of dicot/monocot has given many (including some botanists who should know better) the false impression that dicots and monocots are two completely separate branches of the flowering plant tree. This overgeneralization has been perpetuated in biology textbooks, most of which shamefully gloss over botanical subjects.

[ September 04, 2002: Message edited by: MrDarwin ]</p>

lpetrich

*Sigh*. There goes a nice challenge