Here is a quote from the Naked Scientists Forum (http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/latest-questions/question/2605/) - beautifully written till we get to the last idiotic sentence. But you must judge for yourself. I've broken it up into smaller paragraphs for easier reading.
There was a wonderful paper written by a lady called Jennifer Brodmann, who is a researcher at the University of Ulm, and she was on the Chinese island of Hainan looking at an orchid called Dendrobium sinense.
Now, this is a really interesting orchid because no one knew what pollinated it. It makes these beautiful flowers. It's a white flower with a red centre, but it's rewardless.
In other words, the flower doesn't give anybody anything if they come and visit it. So she decided to do a stakeout and she watched this flower , 121 hours of footage to see what came by. And 35 insects paid a visit of which the majority - over 30 - were a kind of hornet.
And she thought, "That's interesting." At closer inspection, revealed that these hornets didn't come in and spend much time loitering there. They flew in and pounced on the flower and then abruptly left.
But when they looked more closely, they saw that as the hornet was doing the pouncing, it was actually depositing a bit of pollen on the orchid, fertilizing it and also picking up some pollen to take to another flower.
So they thought, "There must be something which is attracting this hornet to this flower." So they made extracts of all the chemicals that come out of the flower and they found one really interesting one.
It's eicosen-1-ol. And this particular molecule is a pheromone made by bees. And, in fact, it's an alarm pheromone that bees make when they want to tell other bees about something exciting going on.
And what they realized is that this hornet species eats bees and it feeds the bees to its young hornet larvae.
So what the orchid is doing is making itself smell like a bee to attract a hornet, to get itself fertilised. And it's doing it by making the same chemicals that the bees would and, thereby, fooling the hornet, so a wonderful example of sexual kind of subversion going on.
The point is that the plant has evolved to have the same genetic pathway or the same synthetic pathway that can produce these chemicals because this is the way in which it gets itself pollinated, and very effectively too by the look of it.
If you want to read it, it was actually published in Current Biology, last year, Jennifer Brodmann, a wonderful bit of science.
Here's the evolutionary madness in full swing!
The plant somehow 'evolved/ figured out' how to perform this miraculous piece of biochemical wizardry!
BEFORE it did so, it wasn't pollinated at all. Remember what Brodmann found from her stakeout:
"And 35 insects paid a visit of which the majority - over 30 - were a kind of hornet."
Only hornets/wasps did the job.
Therefore, in the time BEFORE any wasps/hornets appeared on the scene, the plant was unable to be pollinated! And therefore couldn't exist!
But it did somehow (heh heh!), and then, miracle of miracles, it performed this miraculous biochemical feat, producing this wonderful chemical which attracted the wasps/ hornets and conned them into fertilising its flowers.
Do you see the role that instinct plays in all this?
The wasps MUST HAVE HAD the instincts in them which caused them to be attracted to the chemical - whether produced by the flower or not. How did they get that instinct? And how did it enter their genome?
The plant MUST HAVE HAD THE INSTINCTS and biochemical mechanisms IMPLANTED completely in ONE GO - or it would have perished! No instinct, no chemical. No chemical, no fertilisation. No fertilisation, extinction followeth immediately.
So dear evolutionary friends, explain to us how this happened.
It is a huge pity that this utterly brilliant piece of research, which deals with the wonders of the natural world, and not with test tube Biology, should be made to serve such an idiotic theory.
Just to remind you of the stupidity:
"So what the orchid is doing is making itself smell like a bee to attract a hornet, to get itself fertilised.
Heh heh heh! It knows what a bee smells like, you see, and has figured out that if it makes itself smell like one - how to do that, one wonders! - then it'll get pollinated!!!
And it's doing it by making the same chemicals that the bees would and, thereby, fooling the hornet, so a wonderful example of sexual kind of subversion going on.
Heh heh heh! It figured out how to make the chemicals, guys! I bet there are millions of graduate chemistry students who couldn't figure that one out! And look! It knows about 'subversion'! Quite a brain in that little plant!
The point is that the plant has evolved to have the same genetic pathway or the same synthetic pathway that can produce these chemicals because this is the way in which it gets itself pollinated, and very effectively too by the look of it.
Oooooh! Just look! The plant 'evolved' to have the same 'genetic pathway' or the 'same synthetic pathway' to get itself pollinated!!!!!
Somebody - allegedly intelligent - wrote that nonsense! Should get a PhD in fairy tale writing.
Come on BenV, how can you remain attached to such nonsense?
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