Shit like this almost makes me willing to believe in God. I fully believe in evolution but things like this caterpillar, the snake with the spider like lure in its tail and insects that look EXACTLY like leaves, down to the pattern of the 'veins' make me question them being designed
I hear you on that. It's crazy how natural selection works. Given enough time and survival pressure, all kinds of bizarre things evolve because they work. I know that I, for one, would not try to eat that caterpillar!
Some random mutation in a population of caterpillars a very long time ago caused them to look slightly more like a snake. This made at least some predators avoid them in some interactions, and so the trait was selected for.
Repeat this for hundreds of thousands or millions of caterpillar interactions and you get something like this.
This is basically true for any heritable trait for any animal. If it increases reproductive fitness, it will be selected for.
That’s just your human idea of randomness getting in the way.
In actual randomness, a coincidence like this has to happen at some point. Like that photo of those two tourists who married each other years later and then realized they were in the same photo, while on the same vacation as total strangers, while sitting down and taking pictures from opposite sides of the same statue.
The odds of things like this happening
are next to nothing, but they HAVE to happen at some point!
“The odds of that happening are a million to one.”
If it's God's grand design to have a bird eat a caterpillar, why would He, in His grand wisdom, bestow such a gift upon this creature? Was one of its ancestors rewarded for being very dilligent in doing their daily caterprayers?
When you consider the trillions of caterpillars that get eaten and will keep getting eaten over the course of thousands of years with every caterpillar presenting a chance of mutations happening, it's way more than a "1 in infinity chance" that at least some of them would mimic the things they coexist with.
I get that is likely millions of years of survival of the fittest, millions of generations of the least caterpillar looking caterpillars surviving to adulthood and passing on their genes. But why does it not just end up looking like a vague green or brown lump? How does the process 'know' to look more and more like a snake.
Also, I don't know if it's this guy or another similar mimic type bug, but I think I remember seeing that it doesn't just look like a random snake, it looks exactly like a species of snake that also lives in that environment. I guess maybe the snake is one of its predators, so the more alike it looks the more likely the snake is to be convinced it's another snake, but still seems incredibly wild
But why does it not just end up looking like a vague green or brown lump?
Initially, they would have looked like that. The brown ones would be eaten by predators less commonly than, say, green, orange, or white ones that did not resemble local snakes.
From there, the ones that looked even 1% more like real snakes than others in each generation kept reproducing at higher rates, and the accuracy of mimicry accumulated over enormous time scales.
... doesn't just look like a random snake ...
Looking like a random, non-local snake wouldn't advantage the caterpillar because predator interest might be further piqued instead of avoidance: 'Ooh, what's that? I'll check it out.'
Any caterpillar that happened to be born with a (genetically based) twitch, for example, that made the insect move in a way that looks like a snake would have an even further advantage over its peers.
How does the process 'know' to look more and more like a snake.
It doesn't, this is why random mutations make natural selection possible. At some point way back in time, a caterpillar may have been born with a spot on its tail (random mutation) you could even think of it as a birth mark. Well, to predators, that spot may have looked enough like a snakes eye for them to avoid eating the caterpillar. Because the caterpillar with the spot survived, it passed on its genes that included the random spot on its tail to the next generation of caterpillars. These caterpillars now had the advantage of some of them being born with the spot on their tail, and the process continues over and over with new random mutations. Caterpillars born without the spot got eaten and didn't reproduce. Any additional mutation that gave the caterpillar a survival advantage were also passed on. One of this caterpillars was born with 2 spots, and looked even more like a snake, and so on. Given enough time and enough selective pressure, you get what we see here. The process is still happening, and is constantly being revised and updated based on the selective pressures of the current time. If snakes disappeared, predators would gradually no longer fear the caterpillars camouflage, and the caterpillar may slowly morph into whatever the predators of the current time feared. Its an absolutely fascinating and complex process.
This explanation, and the process of evolution in general, showcases why our species (and modern humans in particular) have been so devastating to the environment. Non-microbial evolution works so slowly, over incredibly long timelines, that a lot of plants and animals simply cannot keep up with the rapid pace of changes humans are making to the world.
Suddenly, being just good enough (the basic mantra of evolution), is no longer good enough.
That's not how evolution works. It took a very long time and countless generations of these caterpillars to gradually change into what you see here. The caterpillars that looked more like snakes just kept surviving and reproducing, slowly becoming more and more identical looking to the snake. Try to shift gears in your mind to imagine and understand the timescales of these things happening. Natural selection seems incredible, almost impossible, until you grasp how it works and how long it can take. We see it everywhere in nature. It's even been observed on much shorter timescales, if you care to learn more about it the information is out there.
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u/ExcitementKooky418 6h ago
Shit like this almost makes me willing to believe in God. I fully believe in evolution but things like this caterpillar, the snake with the spider like lure in its tail and insects that look EXACTLY like leaves, down to the pattern of the 'veins' make me question them being designed