Pollen pummels evolution theory

Sigh! Why oh why must the good folk at National Geographic ruin an otherwise brilliant contribution to our awareness of nature's manifold contrivances with evolutionary silliness? The inspiringly-illustrated article "Love is in the air" falls from grace in attributing the origin of unbelievable pollination mechanisms to a "trick":

For much of the long history of green life on land, plants had to be near each other, touching almost, to mate. Moss lets its pale sperm into rainwater to float to nearby partners. Vegetation could only survive in those damp corners where beads of water connected, dependably, a male to a female. Then one day more than 375 million years ago, it happened. One lineage of plants evolved pollen grains and seeds, and from then on nothing was the same. It was an evolutionary trick that transformed the world by letting strangers have sex.

Such rhapsodical songs of praise may succeed in fooling those who believe in Rumplestiltskin and the Wizard of Oz - but that doesn't include you. Jeers for such patent nonsense, but cheers for bringing up a top case for illustrating the absurdity of evolution theory. So we are meant to believe that pollen grains and seeds - the entire suite of structures, at both macroscopic and microscopic scales, that facilitate sexual reproduction in seed-bearing plants - popped into being "one day". Of course, we understand that "one day" is aimed at evolution illiterates like you and me; the wise realize that the adverbial phrase of time is not to be taken in a religiously fundamentalist way as meaning what it says. Enough of playing angel's advocate for the author! Even interpreting "one day" to actually mean "over a few million years", the author gives away a trade secret -the earliest seed-bearing plants popped up in the fossil record virtually overnight.

Of course, committed evolutionists will respond that the fossil record is incomplete due to varying environmental conditions over time and the presence or absence of resistant structures in living things, blah, blah, blah. Facts are facts. Fully functional mechanisms for the production of "male" pollen, the transport of pollen to another plant of the same species, the catching of pollen by "female" structures, the germination of pollen followed by the carrying of its genetic material with pinpoint accuracy to the waiting female genetic material, and much more, appear full-blown in the fossil record. The simple truth is that the system could not work if so much as one link in the chain was missing. Even if you had everything else lined up but were, say, lacking a mechanism for carrying the pollen from the stamen of one

plant to the stigma of another, the result would be. total failure. And evolution theory says that a new structure supposedly brought into being by a blip in the genes would only survive the winnowing process of natural selection if it gave its bearers an advantage over its non-mutated siblings. An anther without stamens would confer no advantage to its bearer, and vice versa. Indeed, this "irreducible complexity" truism gives evolutionists nightmares - though they won't admit it.

Now think about this. The first pollen-and-seed-bearing plants were conifers, or cone-bearing, plants. In these plants, the pollen is carried from the male organs of one plant to the waiting female structures of another by wind. But the simplicity of that concept belies the problems that must be solved in order to bring about success, to ensure that the arrow hits the bulls eye. Consider this quote from Scientific American:

Many plants are almost perfectly engineered to capture pollen from the wind. Cones, flower clusters and other structures channel the airflow - and sperm-producing pollen - toward reproductive surfaces (Karl Niklas circa 1985, Aerodynamics of Wind Pollination).

Doesn't that take your breath away? Rough enough is just not good enough even for the "simplest" link in the pollination chain. Hang on, I forgot something. This author is describing modern plants which have had 375 million years to perfect their design through evolutionary methods. Those primitive early ones would not have been so precisely engineered. No? Then how would they have survived? If the arrows didn't find the bulls eye, pollination would not have occurred and the poor plant struggling to survive would have perished. Today's Ferraris may be more sophisticated that a Model T Ford, but the Model T was still a masterpiece of engineering. If it weren't, it would never have conquered the world. (The truth is that even the earliest conifers were Ferraris, not Model Ts, but I trust you get the point.) Now if precision engineering is required to merely snare the floating pollen, how much more is required to manufacture the stuff? Random mutations? Tripe and nonsense.

Will we ever wake up to our collective intellectual nakedness clearly visible through the sheer negligee of evolution theory? In spite of all the triumphalist pronouncements from its advocates, the reality is that evolution theory doesn't work, it simply doesn't work. In spite of all their patronizing mockery of William Paley and his bullet-proof arguments for divine creation, evolutionists continue to knit with soot; worthy successors to the emperor's robe-makers.