The Amazing Fig Tree Wasp – David Cloud

THE AMAZING FIG TREE-WASP SYMBIOSIS

(Friday Church News Notes, April 6, 2018, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) – The biblical fig is the Ficus carica, which is native to Western Asia but is grown commercially throughout the world. It is a deciduous tree that grows to a height of 23-33 feet (7-10 m)

The fragrant leaves are 5-10 inches long and 4-7 inches wide and are deeply lobed with three or five lobes. It is a beautiful tree with smooth white bark and multiple trunks that form a great variety of habits or forms. As the tree ages, the thick trunks and the above-ground roots are intertwined to form beautiful shapes. It is pollinated by a fig wasp, which is the only creature capable of pollinating this tree. There are more than 700 species of figs and each has its own specialized wasp. The tree bears two types of fruit, one (the caprifig) is capable of being pollinated for reproduction of the tree; the other is female and is the edible fruit. The female wasp crawls inside the caprifig through a tiny hole (the ostiole), lays her eggs and dies. After the offspring hatch, the males mate with the females, then dig tunnels out of the fruit and die. The females, covered in fig pollen, crawl out of the tunnels and fly off to repeat the cycle. This is one of the myriad of symbiotic relationships in “nature.” The wasp provides the tree with pollination services, while the tree provides the wasp with a safe environment for reproduction. Evolutionists claim that the wasp-fig wasp symbiosis is an example of “co-evolution,” but if so it means that these two complex living things “evolved” at exactly the same time with full-blown capabilities. That sounds more like creation to me! The idea of “co-evolution” is an evolutionary “Just So” story that attempts to explain away the complexity of creation, but it is a fairy tale. Evolutionists have never proposed a creative mechanism that could produce complex living creatures. Natural selection is not creative but genetically selective, and mutations are overwhelmingly destructive and do not build up information to the creature’s genome in a creative way.

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