Tuesday, September 12, 2023

Creation Moment 9/13/2023 - Lessons of the Lack of a Blue Rose

And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
Genesis 1:22


"About eight species of rose occur naturally, and none of them are
blue. For centuries, rose enthusiasts have been breeding new varieties of roses, but the lack of naturally occurring blue pigment in any rose was a frustration to rose growers. 
They experimented with all sorts of breeding in attempts to be the first to produce a blue rose, success in which would be a commercial bonanza. 
However, no amount of hybridization, careful selection, or any other conventional process usually used by plant breeders, including changing environmental factors such as soil types, ever produced anything near blue coloration in any type of rose.

First, the genes that enable a plant to produce blue pigment had to be isolated from the tens of thousands of genes located on the chromosomes in the world’s blue-flowered plants. 
The successful company (a subsidiary of Japanese firm Suntory) eventually used petunias, with their over 30,000 kinds of genes. They chose a variety that bore a dark violet flower.

Next, the relevant genes had to be introduced to rose plants and tested to ensure they were not only expressed in mature plants, but also confined to the petals—we don’t want roses with blue leaves or stems.
This testing takes a long time unless you use something like yeast cells for multiplication rather than adult rose plants grown from seed.

Eventually, after much secret work and the expenditure of three
billion yen (c. $US
25 million) by Suntory, the London Telegraph could make the 2008 announcement: “World’s first blue roses after 20 years of research”.

That’s a huge amount of effort and directed intelligence just to produce a blue rose. Yet many claim that all of the amazing life forms on Earth evolved by random mutation of DNA sifted by natural selection over millions of years. The DNA instructions for producing blue pigment in petunias and many other flowering plants, or the pigment that gives a red rose its color, are all assumed to have evolved this way.

--In reality, such genes are not the result of any evolutionary process at all. 
--Instead, God created the programming during Creation Week about 6,000 years ago. And not only petunias and roses, but the original (parent) kinds of every other living creature in the world. The codes for such complex instructions do not just happen ‘naturally’, i.e. by themselves—the years of intelligent effort involved in this ‘dreamful project’ illustrate that."
CMI