Posted on 08/11/2015 8:08:43 AM PDT by Thistooshallpass9
In 1681, the last dodo bird on the planet breathed its last breath. But that was not the final chapter of the bird’s story.
Some 300 years later, botanists on Mauritius—the island where the dodo had lived—noticed that a certain species of tree was rapidly dying off. Tambalacoque trees had historically grown in abundance on Mauritius, but by the 1970s only 13 remained. And all of those remaining were thought to be around 300 years old. Even though they were producing fruit containing seeds each year, none of the seeds were sprouting into saplings.
This meant that no new Tambalacoque trees had sprouted since the late 1600s.
The Tambalacoque’s average lifespan is roughly 300 years, so the last trees of the species were very near the end of their lives. Once those 13 died, the Tambalacoque would be just like the dodo—extinct.
An American ecologist named Stanley Temple wondered if the dodo’s extinction 300 years earlier was connected to the Tambalacoque’s inability to reproduce, which had also set in about 300 years earlier.
Temple traveled to Mauritius to study the Tambalacoque, and made a fascinating discovery: When the dodos were still alive, they would eat the Tambalacoque’s fruit, and only after the seeds had journeyed through their digestive tract could they successfully germinate.
Researcher and writer Robert Doolan explained the discovery:
The tree’s seeds are encased in a thick-walled protective coat, but the dodo’s stone-filled gizzard was able to exert a powerful crushing pressure on them. The bird’s gizzard (a second stomach for grinding food) would pound away at the seed’s coat, weakening it and cracking it a little, but not enough to damage the seed inside. When eventually deposited by the dodo, the seed was able to germinate.
After making this discovery, Temple found a solution to the Tambalacoque’s decline. He brought some American turkeys to Mauritius, and found that their digestive process was similar enough to that of the dodos to be able to activate the Tambalacoque seeds. Thanks to Temple and the turkeys, the Tambalacoque lives on to this day!
The dodo went extinct back in 1681, but 300 years later, it delivered a posthumous message to mankind: The Tambalacoque and the dodo bird would had to have come into existence at the same time in order for the Tambalacoque to survive.
This message presents some problems for the evolutionary theory. Evolutionists say large trees evolved some 360 million years ago, while the ancestors of today’s birds “arrived comparatively late”—about 65 million years ago. That would have left the Tambalacoque tree with no way to germinate its seeds for some 300 million years. The dodo’s message challenges the random mutation theory of evolution—and on this front the bird does not stand alone.
A look at Earth’s ecosystems reveals several other instances in which one species is dependent on another for its survival, or in which the two are mutually dependent: There’s the Calimyrna fig and Blastophaga wasp, the Catalpa worm and Braconid, the Yucca plant and the Pronuba moth, and many more.
In each of these cases, the brilliance of the Creator is on display. The intricacy of His physical creation is clear. And the account of how He created Earth’s sophisticated ecosystems is confirmed.
It should come as no surprise that evolutionists have different explanations for these biological relationships. There’s no shortage of dissertations explaining how such dependencies could have gradually happened over eons as the organisms evolved. Many impressive books explain how it is all still the result of chance mutations. And powerful rebuttals discredit the findings of Temple and other such discoveries.
These explanations and rebuttals fit a predictable pattern of evolutionists attempting to counter any findings that contradict their theory. In many cases, their logic is remarkable, but the premise from which they start is flawed.
In the centuries leading up to the Scientific Revolution, the Catholic Church reigned as the chief authority and knowledge source for much of the world. The clergy generally viewed scientists and their discoveries as a threat to Catholic doctrine. Church officials sometimes embarrassed the church by trying to defend mistaken church teachings such as geocentrism, which science offered empirical evidence against.
Competition between science and religion heated up. For some in the science camp, the desire to undermine church authority became the main motivation. Some scientists challenged God’s very existence as a way to discredit the foundation of religion. Such reasoning spawned the evolutionary theory. Its proponents sometimes undertake studies with that conclusion already firmly in mind. Whatever they can contort into supporting the arguments for evolution, they keep. All else they often reject or downplay.
When society’s most impressive minds all seem to agree that evolution is fact, it can become difficult for us to keep our faith from going the way of the dodo. But that doesn’t have to be the case. To bolster your faith in the Creator, set aside some time to study our free booklet Does God Exist?
Because nothing else in history could have possibly eaten that fruit except the dodo. Only the dodo.
Makes perfect sense.
No, the article says that the "Tambalacoque and the dodo bird would had to have come into existence at the same time in order for the Tambalacoque to survive."
Why couldn't the Dodo have come into existence first? The implication is that the Dodo was likewise dependent upon the Tambalacoque.
The author is grasping at straws to make it sound as preposterous as possible that the Dodo and the Tambalacoque came into existence separately, at different times, and without any particular dependence upon one another - and that they only gradually developed this (one-sided) relationship.
Any further objections?
Regards,
In its own little pocket of fertilizer, too.
I have a simpler explanation. 300 Million years ago the seeds did not have a hard outer shell and there were few animals to eat their seeds so the tree needed no defense mechanism. As animals evolved, more began eating the seeds so the tree evolved a defense mechanism and through natural selection evolved a relationship with the Dodo to propagate.
Occams razor.....
Maybe...but how do the tree know its seeds aren’t germinating? Takes inventory and sez, hmmm I had all these seeds but I ain’t seeing any saplings? Wonder what happened.
Never mind even being aware of second party seed dispersion some distance away.
Then there is that trivial thing of identifying the cause of failure as being covering material strength failure and calculating the appropriate increase in thickness sufficient for needs of seeds.
What’s the mechanism that determines the amount and type of material needed. Long way between a very modest thin and soft seed covering and the shell of a walnut or Brazil nut.
You see where this is heading?
;>)
“Two errors, #1 the tree can live with any other creature whose digestive tract thins the shells, (the example of the American Turkey is given in this very article!)”
Theoretically, but given the tree has a limited range on an isolated island, you’d need to find actual examples of another creature who could fill that role who also lived in the same narrow range that the tree was found in. We can’t just assume that there actually was any other such creature who could have filled the role before the dodo came along.
“error #2 the assumption that the early trees had thick shells”
Yes, that is a legitimate weakness in their argument.
bmp
I thought this was going to be a Global Warming story.
Too big, to fly
Dodo ugly, so Dodo must die.
Most likely.
Records say Dodos tasted really good and were easy to catch becuase they were so stupid. If we could bring them back that would be great—BUT—The bird to bring back would be the Passenger Pidgeon—The last one died in the 1920s and we have some on ice for DNA. They too tasted good. Bring em back. Raise them on farms and we could feast on them. They say Wooly Mamoths taste good too. But, if we brought them back we might be able to domesticate them to do work in Siberia and Alaska. Eskamos could ride around on them.
That's funny on so many levels.
Pilgrims?
The writers of this article aren’t interested in explanation, they are busy providing rationalizations for opposition to the theory of evolution. Appeals to authority, straw men and flat out misrepresentation are all commonly used.
Natural selection?
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