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Reproduction of life is an incredibly complicated and interesting area of study. From the amoeba to the human being, there are a multiplicity of sophisticated methods and strategies that allow reproduction to take place. Articles by evolutionists, creationists, and everyone in between speak of the elegant and complex design that allows reproduction to take place. The design of a pine cone which allows aerodynamic pollination to take place is one of a myriad of interesting plant reproduction techniques.

Pine trees are classified as gymnosperms by botanists. The ovule which contains the egg is not enclosed in a container as is the case in other plants. The ovule has an open end called a micropyle which carries the sperm from the pollen to the egg. In a pine tree, there are small cones growing in clusters. These small ones have pollen-producing chambers which release pollen with its sperm to the air. Female pine cones grow singularly and are generally larger. The problem is one of how to get pollen from the male to the micropyle of the female by wind alone.

Karl J. Niklas at Cornell University has discovered that female pine cones are “aerodynamically designed to filter large amounts of pollen from the air.” Using helium filled bubbles and a wind tunnel, they were able to show that the shape of the interior area of the pine cone funnels wind so that the wind’s contents will be deposited right on top of the micropyle. Would this pattern not deposit everything on top of the micropyle—dust, other plants’ pollen and precipitation?

Each plant’s cone has a slightly different shape than every other plant. In addition to that, each plant’s pollen has a different size and density. Only one density and volume will accumulate right at the micropyle. All other densities will end up somewhere else in the cone, but not where it needs to be to reach the micropyle and ultimately the ovule.

In addition to this incredible system, there are all kinds of other features that can be used to assist gymnosperm reproduction. In some pine trees, the pollen is not released until temperatures approaching 1,000° reaches them. Such pines are ideally designed to re-seed a forest fire area when all other plant life may have been destroyed. The very fact that those who study these features see them as an indication of a high level of design shows that intelligence is involved in the process. To see this intelligence to be a product of chance would seem to this writer to be a greater leap of faith than to recognize a master aeronautical engineer—a God of infinite knowledge that designed and planned all reproductive systoms.

(Data taken from “Aerodynamics of Wind Pollination” by Karl Niklas, Scientific American, July, 1987, pages 90-95.)

—John Clayton, Dandy Designs, November/December, 1994

Cora Gail Trent
www.cgtrent.com
cgtrent@att.net