They sound gross because it's something that's so different to what civilised humans are used to as far as modern medical treatments go I'd guess.

When you think about it, maggots only eat the damaged tissue, could you imagine a surgeon trying to scrape away ONLY the damaged tissue?

I have a documentary that's very old entitled 'Sexual Encounters of the Floral Kind' all about how nature uses insects for reproduction of plants, particularly flowers. e.g. There's a tiny uninhabited island of the coast of Sardinia that grows very large flowers that give off the smell of rotting meat. The only way they can reproduce is through the maggot. The smell attracts the flies and the cycle goes on.

There's many other fascinating plant/insect pairings too and that would also bring me to think, 'who' designed these incredible couplings? Which could well bring things back to only one answer - God?

Right exactly Sonia - a surgeon wouldn't know how far down to scrape or if it's not a 'straight line' he wouldn't know which nooks and crannies to remove. The maggots are very smart about those things and can "surgically" remove only the bad flesh. Quite neat!

Yes I love studying evolution and actually if you do your research, you can read a lot of research on how this works. Biologists LOVE to explore these situations. So for example, hummingbirds, I love hummingbirds. They have noses that are very specifically shaped to match the flowers they frequent. This is how it happens. Say a flock of hummingbirds is blown by a storm onto an island which has a long-throated flower. The hummingbirds with short beaks die off of starvation. The hummingbirds with longer beaks manage to survive. They have kids - and the kids of course have long beaks just like the parents. Some randomly have even longer beaks and some randomly have shorter beaks. The shorter beak ones die. The super-long beaked ones do the very best, get the healthiest and reproduce the most. So in only a few generations, there are only long-beaked birds left, the ones that match the flowers best.

It's like with giraffes. It's not like all giraffes had long necks back in the beginning. But as animals reproduced, the short ones only could eat short plants. The tall ones could eat all sorts of plants - short AND tall. So they had a better chance of health. Over time, the short ones died off because they couldn't get enough food - and the long necked ones got lots of food and did well.

So did God design a system in which there were ways in which animals could survive? Yes. But it's not like he said POOF I make this flower and POOF I make this animal to exactly match it. We can see how the 'bad matches' died and how the 'good matches' thrived.

Survival of the strongest perhap?

One of the flowers in this documentary I mentioned is an orchid and they only grow in a particular area where a certain type of bee lives. The bee enters the orchid and on the way out through a little door in the orchid, is 'trapped' by a part of this orchid as it glues on a little pollen sack. Only once that glue is dried is the bee permitted to leave. The bee then flies onto another orchid and as it enters the flower, the little sack is removed.

If anything happened to either the bees or the orchid, they'd both cease to exist.

Right exactly. The strongest are the ones who have the longevity to have lots of kids and reproduce themselves.

Right again, part of the problem with evolution is that it often ends up making situations where there is TOO perfect a match. That combination of creatures works so well together that other version that are less perfect die out, there isn't enough food for them. So before there were a variety of different bees and some were better and some were worse at this task. The ones that were worse died out. So now there's only one remaining type of bee. If that bee population gets hit by a virus, game over. The flowers die. So it would have been in the flower's best interest to be more general - to appeal to more types of insects. But unfortunately flowers don't think like that They just think "this is really good! I like this combination!" and focus on that survive-to-the-next-generation issue.

I suppose it's like tigers. Tigers evolved over a ton of time to have stripes that matched the grasslands they lived in, so that the patterns of stripes gave them perfect hiding potential. Those tigers that didn't have stripes or that had different kinds of stripes were spotted more easily, and didn't get their mouths on much food. So over the years tigers have managed to match perfectly with this style of jungle and grassland. But what if a gigantic fire struck and wiped out all of that jungle and grassland? Now the plainer tigers would be the ones that survived - the really stripey ones would stand out and never sneak up on any food. So we'd see an evolution of plain colored tigers, maybe tan tigers. The stripey ones would die. That's just the way things go ...

And speaking of evolution, it makes me wonder just where and how humans will evolve. With all the pollution only getting worse each day plus global warming, one can only imagine how or what as humans will evolve.

Maby with Cat eyes.

I've asked him he says he's never heard of it.

I still haven't heard back from the television station so phoned them. They were going to organise some fact sheets for me. Didn't get to watch the last show theo ther night because we had quite a bad storm and lost all power.

Good Luck getting those sheets!

Good luck!