but can he learn to use it?
Biologist Philip Benfrey has discovered yet another checks and balances system built into living things. In short, there are two proteins, dubbed Scarecrow and Short-root and found in the root tips of plants, that balance each other to enable cells to filter nutrients out of ground water. Short-root promotes growth inside the root, but activates the genes that produce Scarecrow in the outermost cells. Scarecrow checks the further diffusion of Short-root. If this system fails, the plant becomes either waterlogged or malnourished.
A Science Daily article quotes Benfey as saying, “Knowing more about how plants developed this key ability to keep water out and let nutrients in is another step toward engineering plants that may be used to replace fossil fuels.”
Umm, no. First off, plants don’t develop abilities. They don’t go to school. They don’t perform experiments. They don’t invent. Like the complex interactions of proteins and genes, they simply are. Knowing how plants develop abilities will teach you no more than knowing how plants commune with Klatu. On the other hand, knowing how plants function can certainly help us develop new abilities as well as refute commonly held–and repeatedly disproven–notions of spontaneous generation.
That knowledge is also, as Benfey put it, “another step toward a better understanding of how humans work.” Since the same Engineer created both mustard plants and humans, it makes perfect sense that principles at work in one will also be at work in the other.
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