And the angel said unto me. "Behold these shall dwindle in unbelief" 1 Nephi 12:22
Posted: Thursday 12 February 2026 ( 2 days ago )
For Darwin Day, I thought I'd (re)post one of my favorite Darwin quotes. Here it is:
I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. -- From a letter to Asa Gray, 22 May 1860
The Ichneumonidae is a family of wasps [1]. A very big family. It is, in fact, one of the largest families in the largest class of animals, the insects. There are over 25,000 species of ichneumonid wasps [2], each one, according to creationists, specially designed by God. My question for them is the same as Charles Darwin's: Why? Why would a beneficent and omnipotent God do such a thing?
To understand the question, it is necessary to know a bit about the ichneumonids. First of all, they are parasitoids, which means that their larvae develop inside the body of a living host, which they slowly eat alive. Eventually, after the wasp larvae finish pupating, they erupt out of the body of the host that they have gradually consumed, tormented, and destroyed as larvae.
It is easy to see how such a thing could exist from an evolutionary standpoint. The body of a caterpillar is good food for larvae. It's not surprising that some organisms have evolved to take advantage of it. But what kind of a God would purposefully design it to be that way?
I have heard five different answers:
For each of these answers, though, I have a question.
Here's a video of a Ichneumonid wasp (Megarhyssa sp.) drilling through the bark of an oak tree to deposit an egg in the tunnel of the siricid wood wasp, whose larva the Maegarhyssa lava will eat alive from the inside in the traditional Ichneumonid fashion (just like God intended it to be).
And here is a photo of a Darwin Wasp (Xorides sp.) ovipositing in a spruce stump in my own backyard.
