The Evolutionist View of Leaf Development

As we have seen, there are highly complex systems squeezed into a tiny green body. These complex systems in leaves have been functioning perfectly for millions of years. So how did it happen that these systems came to fit into such a tiny area? How did the complex design in leaves come about? Is it possible that such a unique and perfect design came about by itself?
If we ask the defenders of the theory of evolution, their answer will be the same as always. They will put forward explanations and assumptions that have no logic and which are mutually contradictory. They will try to answer the question of how innumerable varieties of plants, trees, flowers, sea plants, grasses, and fungi "came about"-but without success.
When the theories put forward by evolutionists regarding the development of leaves are examined, they will be seen to be full of meaningless, even ridiculous, claims. One of them, the telome theory suggests that the leaf arose through repeated complex branchings and fusions of stem systems. 36 Let us now consider the questions which arise from this baseless claim:
- How did these branchings and fusions come about?
- As the result of what coincidences did they turn into leaves, with their totally different construction and planning?
- How did it happen that the thousands, nay, the millions of varieties of plants, flowers, trees, and grasses emerged from these primitive plants?
Evolutionists have no logical and scientific answers to any of these questions. As on every subject, evolutionists can produce no other explanation regarding the coming into being of plants than imaginary scenarios based entirely on imagination.

According to another theory on the subject (the enation theory), the leaf evolved through simple stem outgrowths (enations) 37

Let us once more examine the questions which arise from this.
How did it happen that enations, or flaps of tissue, emerged in certain places in the body to turn into leaves?
And later, how did they turn into leaves? And, not just any leaves, but leaves with flawless constructions in countless varieties?
Let us go back a little. How did the stems, which these enations emerge from, come into existence?
There is no scientific answer from evolutionists to questions of this sort.
What evolutionist theories actually want to explain is, in essence, as follows: Plants emerged as the result of events which came about by coincidence. Stems and branches came about by coincidence, chlorophyll came to be in chloroplasts by another coincidence, the different layers in leaves are another coincidence, once coincidence followed on the heels of another, and eventually, leaves emerged, with their flawless and particular construction.
At this point, the fact that all these structures in leaves, which are claimed to have come about by coincidence, must have come about at the same time is a truth which cannot and must not be ignored. According to evolutionists, all the mechanisms in the leaf arose from coincidences gradually over time. And the same evolutionist logic predicts that organs or systems which are not used will eventually disappear. Since all the mechanisms in leaves are interlinked, it makes no sense to say that one of them came about by coincidence. Because according to the second stage of evolutionist logic, this mechanism would have already disappeared, because it served no purpose. For this reason, in order for the plant to stay alive, all the complex systems in its roots, stems, and leaves have to exist at one and the same time.
As with every living creature in the world, plants were brought into being with flawless systems, and, from the moment they were created, have come down to today, with no changes in their features. From the falling of the leaves, to their turning themselves towards the sun, from their green colour to the woody nature of their bodies, from the existence of their roots, to the emergence of their fruits - all their structures are flawless. Even with today's technology it would be impossible to imitate or reproduce even similar systems (the process of photosynthesis, for instance).
This complexity is one of the proofs that leaves could not have emerged by chance. Leaves possess specially planned structures, to meet plants' needs to produce food and to do respiration. The existence of special planning proves the existence of a planner. The details and perfection of the planning introduce to us the planner's knowledge, intelligence, and art. There is no doubt that it is God, the Lord of all the Worlds, who created leaves with their perfect design.

The Miracle of Photosynthesis

The Earth is a planet specially designed to support life. The Earth provides an environment that can sustain life, thanks to the many very sensitive balances set up on it, from the gas levels in the atmosphere to its distance from the sun, from the existence of mountains to the presence of drinking water, from the wide variety of plants to the temperature of the Earth.
If the components which make up life are to survive, both the physical and the biological balances have to be maintained. For example, in the same way as gravity is indispensable for living things to live on the ground, so the substances plants produce are just as necessary for the survival of life.
As we indicated earlier, the process which plants carry out to produce these organic substances is called photosynthesis. The process of photosynthesis, which can be summarised as plants' producing their own food, is what makes them different from other living things. What makes this difference is the existence of structures in plant cells (unlike human or animal cells), which can make direct use of sunlight. With the help of these structures, plant cells turn the energy from the sun, which human beings and animals absorb by means of food, into energy and store it, again by special means. In this way, the process of photosynthesis is completed.
Of course, it is not the plant itself which carries out this process, nor the leaves, nor even the totality of the plant cells. It is a small organ found in plant cells called the "chloroplast," which gives plants their green colour and carries out these processes. Chloroplasts are one thousandth of a millimetre in size, for which reason they can be seen only through a microscope. The wall of the chloroplast, which plays such an important role in photosynthesis, is just one hundred millionth of a metre in size. As we can see, these figures are extremely small, and all the processes take place in this microscopic environment. This is one of the astounding features of photosynthesis.

The Chloroplast: A Factory Full of Secrets

In a chloroplast there are various formations such as thylakoids, internal and external membranes, stromata, enzymes, ribosomes, RNA, and DNA to bring about photosynthesis. These formations are all interlinked, both structurally and in terms of their functions, and each one has very important functions which it carries out within its own body. For example, the chloroplast's outer membrane regulates the flow of materials into and out of each chloroplast. The internal membrane system consists of flattened sacs, or thylacoids which resemble discs. Pigment molecules (chlorophylls) and enzymes essential for photosynthesis are embedded in the thylakoids. Many of the thylakoids are stacked, forming structures called "grana," which allow maximum absorption of sunlight. This means the plant absorbing more light and being able to carry out more photosynthesis.
Surrounding the thylakoids is a lipid solution, the "stroma," which contains other enzymes as well as DNA, RNA, and ribosomes. With the DNA and ribosomes they possess, chloroplasts both reproduce and produce certain proteins. (49)

What carries out photosynthesis in green plants is an organelle in the plant cell, called the chloroplast. The chloroplast shown magnified in the picture is really only one thousandth of a millimetre in size. Inside it are a number of subsidiary organelles for the photosynthesis process. The process of photosynthesis, which comes about in several stages, some of which are still not fully understood, takes place at great speed in this microscopic factory.

Another important point in photosynthesis is that all these processes take place in a period of time so short as to be unobservable. The thousands of chlorophylls found in chloroplasts simultaneously produce their reaction to sunlight in the unbelievably short time of a thousandth of a second.
While scientists describe the photosynthesis event in chloroplasts as a long chemical chain reaction, they are unable to explain some parts of what happens in this chain on account of that speed, and simply look on in amazement. But it is clearly understood that photosynthesis involves two stages. These are known as the "light reactions" and the "dark reactions."

The Light Reactions

Radiations from the sun form a continuous series. The range of radiations that organisms detect with their eyes - visible light - is roughly the same range plants use. Shorter wavelengths (blue light) are more energetic than longer wavelengths (red light). Pigments are substances that absorb visible light; different pigments absorb different wavelengths. Chlorophyll, the main pigment of photosynthesis, absorbs light primarily in the blue and red regions of the visible spectrum. Green light is not appreciably absorbed by chlorophyll; instead, it is reflected. Plants usually appear green because their leaves reflect most of the green light that strikes them.38
The process of photosynthesis starts with the absorption of sunlight by these pigments, which make plants look green. But how do the chlorophylls begin the process of photosynthesis by absorbing sunlight? In order to answer this question it will be useful to first of all examine the structure of the thylakoid, which is found inside the chloroplasts and contains the chlorophylls within it.
There are two types of chlorophylls, "chlorophyll-a" and "chlorophyll-b." The light dependent reactions of photosynthesis begin when chlorophyll a and accessory pigments absorb light. As we can see in the picture where the detailed structure of the thylakoid is explained, chlorophyll molecules, accessory pigments, and associated electron acceptors are organized into units called photosystems. There are two types of photosystems, Photosystem I and Photosystem II. The light energy is transferred to a special "chlorophyll-a" molecule called the reaction center. The energy obtained from the absorption of sunlight gives rise to the loss of energy-rich electrons in the reaction centres. These energy-rich electrons are used in subsequent stages to obtain oxygen from water.
At this stage there is a flow of electrons. The electrons lost by "Photosystem I" are replaced by electrons lost from "Photosystem II." Electrons lost by "Photosystem II" are replaced by electrons removed from the water. As a result, water is separated into oxygen, protons, and electrons.

The chlorophyll substance in leaves is found in a structure called the thylakoid in the chloroplasts. When studying the above plan of a thylakoid, it must not be forgotten that this is just a very small part of an organelle called the chloroplast, itself only one thousandth of a millimetre in size. It is of course impossible for the detailed design in thylakoids to have come about by coincidence. This structure, like everything else in the universe, was created by God.

At the end of the electron flow, the electrons, along with the protons from water are transported to the inside of the thylakoid and combine with a hydrogen-carrier molecule NADP+ (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate). The molecule NADPH results from this.
As electrons flow from carrier to carrier along the electron transport system, a proton gradient is established across the thylakoid membrane; the potential energy of the gradient is used to form ATP (an energy package which the cell will use in its own processes). At the end of all these processes, the energy which plants need to create their own nutrition is ready for use.
These events, which we have tried to summarise as a chain reaction, are only the first half of the photosynthesis process. Energy is necessary for plants to produce nutrition. For this to be obtained, the other processes are fully completed, thanks to a specially planned "special fuel production plan."

The Dark Reactions

These processes, the second stage in photosynthesis, known as the Dark Reactions or Calvin Cycle, take place in the regions of the chloroplast known as "stroma." The energy-charged ATP and NADPH molecules produced by the light reactions are used to reduce carbondioxide to organic carbon. The end-product of the dark reactions is used as a starting material for other organic compounds needed by the cell.
It took scientists hundreds of years to understand the main lines of this chain reaction which we have summarised here. Organic carbon, which cannot be produced in any other manner in the world, have been produced by plants for millions of years. This molecule is the energy source for all living systems.
During the photosynthesis reactions, enzymes and other structures with different features and tasks work in complete cooperation. No matter what highly developed equipment it may have, no laboratory in the world can work with the capacity plants have. Whereas in plants all these processes take place in a tiny organ just one thousandth of a millimetre in size. The diverse formulae have been implemented for millions of years, with no confusion of all the variety of plants, no mistakes in the order of reactions, and no confusion in the quantities of basic materials used in photosynthesis.
The process of photosynthesis also has another aspect. The complicated processes outlined above lead plants at the end of photosynthesis to produce the glucose and oxygen essential to living things. These products made by plants are used by humans and animals as food. By means of these foods, they store energy in their cells and use it. By virtue of this system, all living things make use of the Sun's energy.