Seen on a sign at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Edinburgh:
Plants and Pollinators. One can’t live without the other.
So which evolved first?
If the plants that need pollination evolved first, how did they survive for millions of years until the pollinators evolved? Why didn’t natural selection weed them out long before pollinators arrived on the scene?
If the pollinators evolved first, how did they survive for millions of years until plant pollen evolved? Why didn’t natural selection weed them out first?
Natural selection is not only “survival of the fittest” — it also says that unused characteristics will disappear over time. If a characteristic is not beneficial to an organism, it will be weeded out by natural selection — those organisms that have the characteristic will be squeezed out by those who don’t.
So natural selection becomes very problematic when you have two separate organisms which rely on each other (sometimes known as mutualism or mutualistic symbiosis), or two separate characteristics in the same organism.
Which evolved first, the human retina’s ability to invert images or the human brain’s ability to re-invert them so that we see normally? Whichever evolved first, you would have had people who saw everything upside down until the other capability evolved. How did they survive? Why did natural selection not filter them out?
There are so many, many “which evolved first” questions in nature.
Certainly, evolutionists can come up with speculative theories as to how plants and pollinators could have evolved/survived separately until the second one came along. But how many speculative theories do you need before you begin to say, “Hey, wait a minute, this is getting less and less credible”?
There’s an alternative. It is easy to see how plants could survive if the pollinators were created two days after the plants were. If Someone had a plan, and made people with a retina that inverts an image and a brain that reinverts it, and made them both at the same time, then it is easy to see why natural selection wouldn’t filter those characteristics out of existence.
If Someone made mycorrhiza, the symbiotic fungus on plant roots, at the same time He made the plants, then we don’t have to ask which evolved first, or how it survived natural selection and prospered before the other evolved.
The advocates of atheism and/or evolution want to tell us that this is a matter of settled science, that evolution is the source of the plants and animals we see around us, the origin of the species and the origin of humans. But there are so many niggling little questions, and on some of them, the evolutionist explanations and theories become more and more far-fetched.
There is only one eyewitness to the origin of the species, and His name isn’t Darwin. :) Perhaps, since the alternative explanations don’t have very credible explanations for the complexity of the species and some of the other questions, such as “which evolved first”, we’d do better to just accept God’s Word on what happened. After all, He is the One who saw it all.