The vanilla bean-evolutionary quandry

[Tonus]

Later, it was found out there is a certain kind of bee that knows how to lift a little hood-like membrane to expose the goodies.
The Melipona bee does it's thing from flower to flower and the fruit that comes forth is vanilla.
The bee AND the plant needed to be on the scene from day one, or there would be NO vanilla ice-cream today.

The vanilla bean and melipona bee haven't got anything on parasitic wasps and the amazing things that each specific species of wasp does to a specific species of caterpillar. Read up on them and you'll sit there wondering how a wasp was born with the sudden desire to impregnate a caterpillar with eggs that held larvae who could produce a synthetic hormone that would alter the caterpillar's behavior in a specific way that would ensure the wasp larvae's survival!

Of course, evolution doesn't work that way. It's more likely that the one variant of vanilla bean that managed to continue to evolve was the one that happened to develop alongside a variant of bee that evolved to pollinate it. If this seems miraculous, it's only because there are millions of species of life that no longer exist because they could not find the right caterpillar, or the right bee, and simply died out. What we have today are the few examples that managed to find a synergy that kept them both alive long enough to reproduce, and which probably won't be enough to save them from extinction at some point in time.

At that point in time, there will be other species and other synergies and probably other people marveling over them and declaring them as the obvious work of some divine (yet always absent) intellect.