POLLINATION
(Friday Church News Notes, July 14, 2017, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143)
The pollination system is a finely-tuned symbiotic process that involves countless different types of flowers, insects, and birds, all perfectly integrated to maintain life. The yucca plant depends on the yucca moth for fertilization, and the moth’s larva depend on that particular plant for food. The voodoo lily raises its temperature by 25 degrees and releases a scent that smells like rotting meat to attract a certain beetle. As it crawls around inside the flower looking for food, it is covered with pollen, which it spreads from flower to flower. Consider the orchid. “In many cases the development is such that the flower and insect fit each other like glove and hand. In some cases the device is so ingenious that the bee or other insect is attracted by the fragrance and nectar into a chamber from which there is only one way of escape, and in escaping the insect must first touch the stigma and then the stamen, and as it passes to the next flower it carries the pollen to the next stigma. But the devices are almost endless. There are over seven thousand different species known…” (Robert Broom, The Coming of Man: Was It Accident or Design?). Bucket orchids, for example, attract two kinds of bees that are drawn to its liquid because it attracts female bees for mating. Since the surface of the orchid is slimy, the bee slips into a tunnel that collapses, trapping the bee and attaching pollen sacs to it, before releasing it. The same bee falls into the same trap in a second orchid, but instead of attaching more pollen sacs, this orchid unhooks the sacs, thus completing the pollination process (Geoff Chapman, “Orchids … a Witness to the Creator,” Creation Ex Nihilo, Dec. 1996-Feb. 1997). Blind evolution had to “create” the DNA for each one of these amazing devices; and not only that, it had to “create” the perfect interrelatedness between the plant and pollinating insect. How did this happen when there was no designer, when the flower was incapable of studying the insect and the insect was incapable of studying the flower, yet each is dependent upon the other for survival and each is perfectly fitted for its role in the intricate process? “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse” (Romans 1:20).