May 6, 2008
Worms
With the light and all, our mostly glassed-in dogtrot entryway aka the Narthex is a good place for growies, what some architects and other designers call intentionally-located greenery. Among other contenders, we’ve three ferns out there — a Dallas, an African, and a Korean called Suzy Wong. We’ve decided the Dallas must be the earliest at something because it seems always to get the worm.
A little black quiggly varmoot had set about systematically dismantling Dallas the other day when we spied it and promptly put it out to pasture. It had made the mistake of crawling on top of a frond in plain sight.
Intelligent Design (aka ID), however, must move fast, for the next day one of the worm’s colleagues was found crawling underneath a frond, surely considering itself out of sight. It was even tidier with its table manners, but it had not been designed well enough to contend with our superior intelligence.
Ferns — and worms — have been around a long time. In my geologist days, I’d occasionally find a fossil fern, its fronds so delicately preserved in some 400 million year-old shale that only the color had disappeared. Such plant fossils make nice markers to keep one from getting lost along the geologic way.
I don’t know what ID says, but I hear their Creationist devotees claim the devil puts such as this around just to trick us into going along with old Bishop James Ussher that the world is hardly four million years old, but actually was created not before October 23, 4004 BCE. So the worm turns, but I’d just as soon we don’t teach this sort of thing unless Albert Einstein’s assurance gets equal time, you know, that God does not play dice with the universe.
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