Creation Moments

If you live in a climate where fall brings colors to the leaves before they fall, you've probably noticed something strange. Once the leaves start to fall, the ground is littered with their color. But among all those fading leaves, you might find a perfectly healthy looking green leaf. That green leaf is probably the work of one of God's more amazing tiny insects.

Several species of beetles, flies and moths go through a larval stage in which the larvae burrow into leaves. These leaf-miners gain their nutrition from the leaf. But when fall comes, and the leaves lose their green chlorophyll, they stop making food for the larvae. So the larvae secrete a hormone that prevents the leaf from losing its chlorophyll and shutting down to die. This hormone enables a leaf to stay green and produce food for the larvae even long after the leaf would normally have turned color and dried up on the ground.

Leaf-miners present several problems for those who think that mindless evolution produced the variety of life that we see around us today. How did the larvae learn to make just the right hormone to preserve the leaf on which it depends? Are we to believe that these larvae kept evolving from something else until one of them figured out the chemistry of the leaf? And finally, are we to believe that this unlikely evolutionary event happened in several species?

Just as the sprouting of new leaves in the spring means that summer is near, so the cleverness of the leaf-miner should tell us that the hand of God created this insect. And we can reliably conclude that God made the entire creation.

Mark 13:28

"Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When her branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is near…”

Prayer: Dear Father, I thank You for the witness of Your wonders. Amen.

Ref: Joachim Scheven, “Green Islands,” Origins.