Dr. Davis: Adaptation to the wildfire in the chaparral is pretty remarkable, and that is that plants have adapted to periodic fire. When you have a dry condition, the vegetation will dry out. We have a condition here known as the Santa Anna winds; it’s dry air blowing from the desert. A lightening strike, a natural ignition, the chaparral will catch on fire. They have oil and resin that promotes fire. And in fact, fire is a rejuvenating factor in the chaparral. It doesn’t destroy the plants. Many of them have a large base, a stump or root crown. It’s the crown of the root that’s large. So when the fire comes through, it’s the top of the plant that burns, but the root survives. Within a week or two, that root crown will sprout back and start growing. It will be two, three, four feet tall within one year, and it’s really rejuvenated by fire. In addition, I use the term, they are ‘fire-dependent’, they really depend on fire because, if you look at the seeds, the seeds will not germinate unless they have fire. If you take the seeds to these plants, you add water, they don’t germinate. The seed-coat is too thick, the water can’t get in, the hormones aren’t right for germination. But, if you simulate a fire, many of the species germinate. If they see smoke, smoke promotes germination. Some, the seed coat, we have to put it in concentrated sulfuric acid for an hour, we can put the seeds in boiling water for a minute, and what that does is crack the seed coat like a hot fire. Then the water can get in, and the seed will germinate into a little seedling to establish. So after fire, there are just millions upon millions of seeds that germinated. They are promoted to germinate after fire, it’s a lush environment, and many of the species after fire are what we call, we use the technical term, ‘fire-endemic’. What we mean by that is, they are a fire-follower. These species would not exist in nature if it were not for fire. They need fire as a fire-cue. So the chaparral system is adapted to fire, can stand it, and is dependent on fire because it needs it to rejuvenate. It’s really important to us in sustaining our livelihood, at sustaining the environment here in southern California because, these plants have very deep roots down to, remarkably, we have measured, over 40 feet (15 meters) in depth. And it’s these deep roots that really stabilize a cliff, hold it in place. But, more importantly, a very, very valuable watershed, because, when the rain comes, and percolates through the soil, it can be lost deep in the soil. Or worse yet, it can cause erosion, or slippage of the soil. But if you have deep-rooted plants like these chaparral, they are water pumps, and are pumping deep moisture resources back to the atmosphere, a hundred gallons a day in the case of a very large shrub, 50 gallons a day for a small shrub. And so they are making clouds, they are returning moisture to the atmosphere, they are keeping the soil a little drier, and it’s an incredibly important watershed.

Dr. Caultoff: Well in the 19^th century, I think for example, of Michael Farraday, whose work with electromagnetism and his understanding of the electromagnetic line of force. He was somebody who drew specific analogies between this and God’s hand, and saw himself, in a sense, doing work that reflected his religious faith. And you can see much of this in the 19^th century. But if we jump up to the present, and we say ‘even so, those are all historical figures’, you can’t get much more current than the human genome project. The cover of Time magazine here in the United States had a picture of Frances Collins, who is the Director of the human genome project, and is one of the world’s most important scientists today. Just three years ago, when the American Scientific Affiliation held its annual meeting at Cambridge University in England at Churchill College, Cambridge, which is one of their leading scientific colleges, Frances Collins, who is an ASA member, gave one of the plenary talks and made clear his understanding of the ethical implications of the human genome project, and explained how this raised important issues that only his own Christian faith, he believed, was competent to wrestle with, and that as a Christian, he understood himself as doing valuable work that was fully in keeping with Christianity by working on the understanding of the genetics of the human body which God had made. So whether you begin with Isaac Newton and gravity in the 17^th century, or you end with Frances Collins and the human genome project today, I think there is hardly a generation you could find where there haven’t been leaders of science who would say that they were men of faith. They might disagree, to some degree, as to what that means to be a man of faith. They weren’t all members of the same church, but they certainly did not think that we were a sum product of time plus matter plus chance, and nothing more. It just didn’t work for them, and it still doesn’t today.

Mike: Great men of science, great men of faith. Just two in a long line of scientist-believers looking for God’s creative hand at work in our world.

Dr. Wood: I had found these insects, their common name is caddis fly. I have spent seven years working in detail with that organism, both in the stream, and in the laboratory. I worked on its population, but I also worked on its reproductive biology. Now here is how that works. This is an organism that comes out as an adult in the spring of the year, flies around at night. And the question is, in my mind, in the dark, on a stream, how do males and females find one another? Well, there’s a couple of possibilities. It could be visual, except it’s dark, and their eyes are quite small. So it’s probably not that. It could be auditory, and there could be some sound signal, and we looked for that, and there isn’t. The other possibility, a modality, might be that there is some sort of chemical signal. Some sort of odor or aroma, which we call technically a pheromone. And in fact, that’s the work that I did for my PhD work. And I was able to demonstrate for the first time in this entire group an order of caddis fly called trichoptera in that group. There is a chemical-based pheromone system operating that.

Mike: Dr. Wood was able to isolate the female’s pheromone in the lab. He then bated a trap with the chemical, and then waited to see if the males would be attracted.

Dr. Wood: I can’t tell you how exciting it was the night I went out and first really demonstrated and discovered; I knew it was happening, but it’s the demonstration that’s the hard part. I came back in the morning, and there were seventy males! Seventy males stuck on that trap! I almost fainted. It was one of those ‘jump up and down, run arounds’, so excited that you finally demonstrated this thing. It was a very interesting experience. When I see things like that, it’s just time after time, it’s just the marvel of the creator’s wisdom. It puts all this thing together. It’s a thrill to be able to investigate that, to follow that. Listening and seeing and smelling the change in temperatures and humidity and all that, and you can just feel the creation pulsing. As I read the Bible, I go over and read in Colossians, and it says that Christ sustains the world!