Gardeners Do Not Believe In Intelligent Design

I live in the city, on a small urban plot of land--about 50 feet by 100, and that includes a house as well. So, when I say I have a big garden, it's probably only big in its context. There is a significant portion of non-house land taken up by garden, and it's large in comparison to most of the other gardens in the neighborhood.

It might have even been larger, but considerations of yard for kidlets and puppy to play in have meant that there are large areas of grass remaining.

Sadly, over this summer, I have rather neglected the garden. Actually, So much has been planted so close together, that, in theory anyway, I shouldn't have to weed because there is not much room for weeds to grow. In theory.

It is in grappling with the reality of weeds that one begins to recognize the opportunistic nature of, well, nature. I mean, how is it that bindweed, with its slim twining stem and heart-shaped leaves, manages to grow right where I planted morning glories, with their slim twining stems and heart-shaped leaves? How is it that those nasty little elm seeds manage to land right in the middle of the rosebushes, so they are able to get well established before I even find them, and then I can't pull them out because of the thorns? That are supposed to be protecting the ROSES and NOT the damn ELM TREES!

Don't even talk to me about Virginia creeper. It was eating the front of the house when we bought it. How does it know which way to grow to find something to press its little sucker feet to? I mean, this plant can cross a gap of several feet with nothing to guide it, and it still manages to find a support for its continued conquest.

We had a very old garage, that was not well built and suffered some truly bad decisions over the years. As a result, the garage beams themselves--you know, the wood? that supports the entire structure?--rested on soil, while the concrete garage floor and the asphalt pad were poured afterward--leaving the garage sitting lower than the floor it was supposedly resting on. This created a little trough, in which things collected. And started to grow.

It is time to take down your garage when large plants and volunteer elm trees are growing OUT OF THE FOUNDATION. But how? How do they know where to go to find soil under asphalt and cement and AN ENTIRE FREAKING GARAGE? And what about those hardy weeds that found a crack in the cement floor that just happened to be under a leak in the roof so that it got both sun and rain? HOW DO THEY KNOW?

The answer is, of course, they don't. For every weed that finds that niche in an old garage floor, there are thousands, millions, that don't. By conservative estimate, the neighbor's elm trees deposit about 40 gajillion seeds across our property, and only a handful manage to even germinate, and of those 40 gajillion, a total of 40 gajillion minus one do NOT managed to land inside the protective soil inside a rose bush. There is a lot of bindweed that shows up where the morning glories aren't--they just get pulled up a whole lot soon and their lives are that much shorter.

But it is in gardening that you really start to see how there are A LOT of plants that will grow ANYWHERE there is to sink a root. And these plants are not thinking about where to look for a place to grow--they just grow. And the odds are against finding that one sweet spot in the garage--but when you are playing with 40 gajillion chances, each year (!) you are bound to get lucky maybe once.

And once is all it takes, right? One seed in the right place with the right conditions and grow up and broadcast its own 40 gajillion seeds a year too.

The numbers are just literally unimaginable. There is just no way a human mind can really--and I mean really, completely and in an unboggled state--comprehend the billions of billions at issue here.

One of the illustrations favored by Intelligent Design theorists (or IDs) is the human eyeball. The eye, they claim, is just too complex to have evolved by accident and so must have been "designed" by some higher power--maybe even the higher power mentioned in the Bible.

Is that the higher power that planted bindweed in my morning glories? Or is it that of billions and billions of trials, a few successful, most unsuccessful, one single lone plant landed in that sweet spot? That after many billions of years, with multiple billions of permutations, that such a thing is possible.

All I can say is that I find weeds in the oddest and most frustrating places, and there isn't any plant mind at work in that case, and there is no reason to think humans are THAT biologically different from the rest of the Earth.