The wilderness of Western Australia is home to the thynnid wasp. The females are wingless, and at mating season, they climb up plants to attract the winged males. The females emit pheromones, chemical signals for the males to smell and track them with. After finding a female, a male will pick her up and fly her to another location to mate. One plant, the hammer orchid, benefits from the wasps’ mating ritual in a highly unusual way.

Hammer orchids only grow where thynnids live. Their bloom coincides with the thynnid mating season. It is a peculiar-looking flower, with little on its green stalk except for a purple blob extending outward. It barely looks like a flower at all. But it’s not supposed to look like a flower; it’s supposed to look like a female thynnid.

The flower is approximately the same shape as a female. It has similar coloration and blooms when female thynnids advertise to males. It grows about the same height the females would perch at. Its smell even mimics the pheromones the females emit.

In short, it appears as much like a female thynnid as a flower can. And the males believe the deception.

Males assume the flowers are females. But when one grabs hold of a flower and tries to fly off, he notices the flower isn’t “letting go of the plant.” He tries harder, and in his effort, he triggers the plant to stick pollen on him.

Plants pollinate by sticking pollen on an insect and that insect depositing it on a second flower. So the male thynnid needs to fall for the deception of a second orchid to deposit the pollen if the flower is to reproduce. This happens year after year.

Evolutionists claim that the world’s different species all developed through random, unintelligent forces. This would mean that organisms like the hammer orchid somehow made itself such a perfect mimic of an entirely different organism that it can trick wasps into attempting to mate with it.

The orchid has no brain. It cannot discern what a wasp looks like or smells like. Its very existence points to design.

Romans 1:20 reads, “For ever since the creation of the world [God’s] invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through His workmanship [all His creation, the wonderful things that He has made]” (Amplified Bible). Herbert W. Armstrong summed it up in Does God Exist: “Creation is the proof of God!”

The hammer orchid is a perfect example of this truth. But there are many more just outside your front door: the coordination of a colony of bees, the regenerative ability of grass, the intricacy of a feather and much more.

The next time you step outside, consider the creation, with its myriad of engineering marvels, and take time to ponder the great mind that brought it into existence.