Orchids

This post is especially for my all my Singaporean friends.

Darwin was fascinated by orchids; in his Origin of Species he mentioned the 'inexhaustible number of contrivances' by which orchids ensure their pollination, pointing out that these would have entailed changes in every part of the flower.

One of the most amazing members of the orchid family is the Bucket Orchid, which comes in two species, Coryanthes speciosa and Stanhopea grandiflora.

It has the following mechanisms in place for pollination:
1) It emits a special nectar with a particular smell that attracts males of two species of bee—Euglossa meriana and Euglossa cordata
2) The male bees love this nectar because ONLY this nectar will make the female bees attracted to it (we could stop here because unless both were present at the same time, neither the orchid nor the bee would have reproduced themselves. This is the concept of SYMBIOSIS which is a pain in the neck for evolutionists)
3) The orchid produces a slippery substance so that the bee slips into a bucket (thus its name) of "glue"
4) It can only escape from a tunnel where the walls of the tunnel contract, gripping the bee. The plant's mechanism then glues two pollen sacs to the bee's back, and after allowing time for the glue to dry, releases it.
5) If the bee then flies to another bucket orchid, the same process will take place, except that this time, when the bee attempts to leave the tunnel, a hook in the roof of the tunnel removes the pollen sacs, and the fertilization process is completed!

Now, we can put our heads in the sand and say that all these mechanism came about by gradual evolution over millions of years and somehow the flower still managed to reproduce itself (don't forget the bees) or we can say the most natural thing that would come to our mind. Yes, there must be an extremely intelligent designer who designed it so from the very beginning.