Dock3

The Drakaea Orchid depends on one type of wasp for its survival. The female wasps are wingless,
and live underground, but during the mating season they emerge, climb a tree, and send out hormones
to attract male wasps. A male wasp then grabs a female, and carries her away for mating. Drakaea
Orchids have a heart-shaped leaf which looks and smells like a wingless female wasp. So male

wasps, looking for a mate, land on this leaf, mistake it for a
female, and try to carry it away. As the wasp struggles, a
hinged mechanism tips the wasp upside down and
brushes pollen on to its back. The wasp eventually gives
up and flies away. If it finds another flower, it is again
deceived, and this time the pollen from the first flower is
left behind (see diagram, right).
Gradual evolutionary changes can�t even begin to explain
the origin of the Drakaea Orchid and the amazing
partnership it has with these wasps. In order to get
pollinated, the orchid would have had to develop a leaf that
looked and smelled like a female of this one species of

It would also have had to develop a hinge in just the right place so that the struggling male wasp was
brought into contact with the pollen. Remember, these devices would have to be working perfectly right
from the start, otherwise there would be no Drakaea Orchids! Purposeful design by an all-wise,
intelligent Creator is the only reasonable explanation for the origin and survival of this remarkable
flower.
It is because of such examples that some scientists have coined the phrase irreducible complexity to
describe some of the many organisms which defy a Darwinian explanation. One of them is bio-chemist
Dr Michael Behe, who expands the idea in his popular book Darwin's Black Box, where he writes,
"Applying Darwin's test to the ultra-complex world of molecular machinery and cellular systems that
have been discovered over the past 40 years, we can say that Darwin's theory has "absolutely broken
down"."

THE FOSSIL RECORD:
By his own admission, one of the biggest problems for Darwin's theory was
the fossil record. He wrote, "Why do we not find innumerable transitional
forms embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth? Geology
assuredly does no treveal any such finely graduated chain, and this,
perhaps, is the most serious objection which can be urged against my
theory."

Fossils are a record of life from the past, so naturally, we would expect to find evidence of evolutionary
transitions preserved in the rocks. Darwin believed that, in time, these "missing links" would turn up,
but the now, one and a half centuries after Darwin, there are no indisputable transitional forms. The
following quotes by evolutionists reveal that the "missing link "problem is not something invented by
anti-Darwinists.

�The gaps in the fossil record are real, however. The absence of a record of any important
branching is quite phenomenal. Species are usually static, or nearly so, for long periods, species
seldom and genera never show evolution into new species or genera but replacement of one by
another, and change is more or less abrupt.� �Robert Wesson, Beyond Natural Selection, MIT
Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1991, p. 45.

"Paleontologists had long been aware of a seeming contradiction between Darwin's postulate of
gradualism, confirmed by the work of population genetics, and the actual findings of paleontology.
Following phyletic lines through time seemed to reveal only minimal gradual changes but no clear
evidence for any change of a species into a different genus or for the gradual origin of an
evolutionary novelty. Anything truly novel always seemed to appear quite abruptly in the fossil
record." � Ernst Mayr, Emeritus Professor of Zoology, Harvard University, Toward a New
Philosophy of Biology: Observations of an Evolutionist, Harvard University Press: Cambridge
MA, 1988, pp. 529-530.

"Most families, orders, classes, and phyla appear rather suddenly in the fossil record, often
without anatomically intermediate forms smoothly interlinking evolutionarily derived descendant
taxa with their presumed ancestors." � Dr. Niles Eldredge, Macro-Evolutionary Dynamics:
Species, Niches, and Adaptive Peaks, McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, New York, p. 22, 1998.