“Help thou mine unbelief”?

Question

This is from a documentary I saw on PBS a few years ago.

“The Australian hammer orchid has taken advantage of a mating ritual of the Thynnid wasp, which involves a female wasp waiting on top of a branch or plant for a male to spot her. The hammer orchid's flower mimics the female wasp looking upward for a male flying by, complete with a fake shiny head and furry body. The orchid even releases an enticing female wasp pheromone.”

The development of this and 10,000 other flowers that lure insects is explained through evolution. I can understand how natural selection could promote this flower over one without a wasp pheromone. I can understand how mutation could change the smell or shape of the flower so that after 10 million years we have thousands of different flowers that evolved from one. What I can’t believe is how any of this can explain how a flower could end up looking and smelling like a bee that can lure real bees to transfer pollen.

Help me understand.

Answer 1

First, realize that wasp vision isn't the same as ours, and that you don't know a lot about what does and doesn't "look like" a wasp TO a wasp.

Second, the first flower that resembled a wasp may have done so very, very vaguely. That is, a slight mutation to how the flower looked was enough to attract a little more wasp attention.

This helped that plant reproduce more successfully than similar plants.

Over time, other mutations occurred; the ones that increased the resemblance to wasps helped that plant reproduce more successfully, thus, spreading that mutation.

Finally, the hardest thing to understand is how long a time millions of years really is. It's hundreds of thousands of generations.

Big numbers are hard for us to grasp.

I strongly recommend Stephen Jay Gould, especially his "Reflections on Natural History" series -- the first of which, Ever Since Darwin, has an essay about a clam that has a body part that mimics a fish -- he explicitly discusses how this striking resemblance was the result of the same kind of story I told above (but he tells it better).

Another really good book for understanding evolution is The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins -- the whole purpose of the book is to make evolution intelligible to the layman.

There are also web sites that discuss evolution.

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/

U.C. Berkeley's website on evolution, and

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/evolution

is New Scientists web site (it's a UK science news publication).

It IS hard to grasp -- it took me quite a while to understand it as well as I do, which isn't all that well, really. And I'm fairly smart at learning things. It takes a while of learning the details, and thinking about it, for it to really begin to stick.

But it's fascinating and very fun to learn about.

Answer 2

You have to look at it from the wasps standpoint. The female wasp can use the plant pheromone to attract males to the area. Even if they try to mate with a few flowers first, they are now in the area. It is to the advantage of the female wasp for the flowers to be there.

In no case does the male confuse the flower for the female when the female is present. It appears that the males take flight before the females emerge. The orchids bloom in this window of opportunity. This likely is classic coevolution where both species benefit.

Answer 3

You might be asking the wrong question. Could the insect that looks more like a flower avoid being eaten by predators? Perhaps the more the insect looked like the flower, the higher probability that it survived to produce offspring, and over time, the species evolved to look more like the orchid?

Answer 4

Make a primeval soup...., sprinkle some lightening on it, stir and let it proof for, say, 4.5 billion years....

It ain't that hard.

Let's start by simply understanding that those hammer orchids who by mutation happened to have a dangling petal that attracted wasps for its shape were those that managed to survive by eating the mentioned wasps. And then inherited their genome to other generations of orchids. And so on so forth.

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It is far harder to believe that Holy Mary appeared on a frying pan.