Creation Moment 3/24/2024 - The "Bluffing" on Lignin by Evolutionists

And God said, Let the earth bring forth .... tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
Genesis 1:11

"Lignin is the molecule that gives sturdiness to cell walls and is a major component of wood. Its presence differentiates land plants from the slimy algae of the waters.

Is lignin an invention of early plants evolving onto the land? An entry on EurekAlert announced, “Scientists find evidence for crucial root in the history of plant evolution.” Apparently, new findings were announced at a national meeting of the American Chemical Society about Asteroxylon, an extinct plant found fossilized in chert, that is thought to be one of the earliest plants to invade the land.

George Cody and his team at the Carnegie Institute of Washington used an advanced analytical technique to preserve the fragile biopolymers in the rock and apparently found that this species already had lignin. Cody sets up the question and then explains the findings:

"A critical question is whether Asteroxylon in fact had the capacity to biosynthesize lignin. If it did, it starts to beg an interesting question:

If one of the earliest plants had this capacity, then is it that capacity that allowed plants to colonize the continents? And that, of course, could have enormous significance, because that was probably one of the many truly defining events in Earth history. What we came up with is evidence that really can’t be explained any other way than the fact that this plant, when it lived, had two structural biopolymers in its cell wall. The differences that you see in the spectra are consistent with a greater amount of lignin being in one region of the cell wall than the other, which is consistent with what we see in modern plants."

The rest of the article talks about the technique they used but says nothing else about the evolution of lignin, other than the opening paragraph, which states: “If ancient plants had not migrated from the

shallow seas of early Earth to the barren land of the continents, life as we know it might never have emerged. And now it appears this massive floral colonization may have been spurred by a single genetic mutation that allowed primitive plants to make lignin, a chemical process that leads to the formation of a cell wall”.

We got all excited about this story because it sounded like a big breakthrough, finally, to explain the evolution of plants. But then we looked and looked and couldn’t find anything about evolution, anywhere, except a bunch of bluffing about what a big step this would be if plants could evolve lignin. After setting up the big question, they examine this primitive plant and find lignin already there! 

Q: So the very earliest land plant already had it; where, O where, is the evolution? We feel cheated.

The rest of the article just brags about what a wonderful new technique they have now for getting the biological molecules out of the rock. That’s fine, but we entered this store to buy some evolution and all they offered us was some lab hardware. We thought bait and switch was against the law. If you advertise evidence for evolution, you’d better have the goods in stock.

“Because lignins are very complex natural polymers with many

random couplings, the exact chemical structure is not known,” states The Lignin Institute. And yet the American Chemical Society wants us to believe that this molecule, and the world of land plants that followed, all derive from a single genetic mutation. Sanity alert! This requires some radical lignin therapy. 

We suggest taking a nice walk in the woods..... Ah, relief!"
CEH