Over on Jerry Coyne’s blog, he posted the following:
[S]ome orchids in China have evolved a scent resembling the alarm pheromone of the honeybees that are the wasps’ prey.
The flower’s scent apparently attracts the wasps looking for prey, and those wasps pollinate the orchids. This clever adaptation, a form of “olfactory mimicry” to help the flowers reproduce, was published in Current Biology. The orchid does not show morphological mimicry like some other “bee orchids,” whose flowers have evolved to resemble bees, luring male bees who, in trying to copulate with the mimetic flowers, pollinate them.
This is rather interesting, and yet again confirms one aspect of Darwin’s theory. In chapter 6 of Origin of Species, Darwin wrote: “If it could be proved that any part of the structure of any one species had been formed for the exclusive good of another species, it would annihilate my theory, for such could not have been produced through natural selection.”
The logic behind this prediction of his is very simple. To use our modern genetic terms, genetic mutations that help an organism survive become common in the population precisely because you have to be alive in order to have sex and create new organisms who inherit the same genetics. On the other hand, a mutation that helps out a completely different species won’t cause an organism to leave behind more offspring (unless helping out that species serves to help out the organism’s survival and reproduction in some way, as when trees produce fruit for animals, but only because it allows them to leave behind more offspring).
It’s rather interesting that these wasps “help” the flower, but only because the flower “tricks” them by secreting a scent that wasps respond to because the scent usually indicates the presence of honeybees, whereas here, it doesn’t. All of this is pretty easy to understand with evolution, because, as Coyne puts it:
“If the ancestral orchid had genetic variation that made its scent resemble in some degree the bee pheromone, then it would get pollinated by wasps more often. Such variants would leave more of their genes, and the adaptation would spread.”
On the other hand, if species were created, why wouldn’t the Creator choose to make plants and animals with the one thing natural selection can never produce: true altruism that transcends the species level? Why not make wasps genuinely altruistic instead of making plants that engage in something resembling trickery? The complete absence of this sort of altruism is exactly what natural selection predicts, but is inexplicable (and perhaps even negatively predicted) under creationism.
Note: altruism within members of the same species is well documented, and can be explained by natural selection: Evolution of Altruism summary.
