Plant Defenses
TNRTB Archive – Retained for reference information
German molecular ecologists confirm the declarations in Job and Psalms that God creates life with optimal designs in the ecological relationships between plants and animals. They discovered a set of genes in a native tobacco species that when turned off results in greater vulnerability to the species’ normal herbivores and attracted a suite of other herbivore species that normally never feed upon it. Evidently, these genes control a set of chemical defenses that guarantee that this plant species receives the ideal amount of harvesting by herbivore species best designed to benefit from the harvesting. By ensuring that the harvesting is neither too great nor too small, both the plant species and its herbivores sustain population levels and habitat extents that result in the optimal quality of life for all.
- André Kessler, Rayko Halitschke, and Ian T. Baldwin, “Silencing the Jasmonate Cascade: Induced Plant Defenses and Insect Populations,” Science 305 (2004): 665-68.
- https://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/305/5684/665
- Related Resource
- “Symbiosis: More Complex Than We Knew,” by Hugh Ross