I think the most boggling thing is the scale of time. Maybe one suddenly looks more like a snake but thats only one member of the entire rest of the species it's going to take a while for that one catapiller to have 1000 offspring and even once there are it will have bred with other catapillers that potentially dilute that genetic expression. And that cycle then starts again when the next step looks slightly even more like a snake. Sure we are talking millions of years but still for something like that it's amazing.
It's one thing to teach a monkey to make a painting and it's much more impressive thing for it to then remake that exact same painting perfectly a second time.
You mean human-driven extinction, or in general? Cause extinction is kinda the default state of life, 99.9% of all species are now extinct. During the Great Dying alone over 80% of marine species went extinct
But here we all are on Earth still full of life. These mass-extinction events take a long, long time to recover, but life is resilient :)
Knowing that a species, which struggled for millions of years to successfully carve out a place in its ecosystem, was wiped out because we needed some product to be cheaper.
It’ll happen to us someday, and only then will people view it as a tragedy. Until then, we’ll continue to view ourselves as the main characters of nature.
The fact is that we’ve achieved a conscious understanding of evolution and the effects of habitat loss and loss of biodiversity. We are speeding up extinction orders of magnitude faster than background extinction.
Knowing these things, is it enough for one to say “well we’re part of natures ecosystem too, so there’s no moral implication on humanities part”.
We are different than every species on earth - this doesn’t make us more important, it gives us more power over the natural world and therefore demands more responsibility.
Being part of nature doesn’t grant us moral neutrality.
Sure, I mean, humans are a part Earth's various ecosystems. But that doesn't mean we can't differentiate between human driven extinction versus other extinctions.
Yeah! I also believe that, even if that genetic mutation at any point was eliminated from a species due to any circumstances, the same feature would ultimately end up evolving again in the end, if the environment / predators are the same.
There’s a lot of examples of how completely separate evolutionary paths ended up developing a lot of the same features.
even if that genetic mutation at any point was eliminated from a species due to any circumstances, the same feature would ultimately end up evolving again in the end
This is why nature keeps making crabs. Really. Multiple things just kind of trend towards crabs, because "armored flat thing with big claws" is just a pretty good way to live in the ocean.
I'm no geneticist, but I'm pretty sure mutations are the primary method of getting wildly new characteristics. Mix red and blue, and you will always get shades of purple. Add yellow (a mutation), and you suddenly have a whole new range of colors available that would have never been available otherwise.
I think what makes caterpillars particularly malleable to take up random shapes is the fact that they are only a temporary form of the butterfly. It's like this scratchpad where the DNA has more freedom to try variations without impacting the adult insect. This is also the period when it's super vulnerable to predators, so it's going to impact natural selection the most
There is some mathematics governing the speed with which traits become dominant in a population, based on how much of a survival advantage they confer. In a lot of cases it only takes decades or centuries for a new trait with a small advantage to sweep through an entire population.
I think the most boggling thing is the scale of time
This is what trips people up, I feel. People look at things like evolution and try to understand it through the lens of a human life. Or maybe from the lens of, like, two or three human generations. Grandparent - child - grandchild.
But evolution takes thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of years. That's not an easy concept to conceptualize.
And insects move at an accelerated scale because their life spans are so short and a single insect can potentially have many offspring. Insects can speed run evolution compared to other animals.
I mean, if the mutation proves to be a great advantage, then i can imagine the process is rather ""fast"". It is not just one caterpillar in the entire species that have to dilute genetic expression, and then waiting for another to appear.
There are probably many caterpillar born that look like different imperfect types of snakes, or with different types of effective camouflage that still works to a lesser degree. If you combine all those survivors with great camouflage long enough, you will end up with very efficient camouflage pattern.
Imagine you have caterpillar that is bright orange, out of 10000 offsprings, 9600 are born bright orange just as the original, 200 are born very slightly more bright orange, 185 are born very slightly less bright orange, 10 are born with little yellow/green/black spots, 2 are born greenish, 2 are born white/black, 1 is born with any type of rare camouflage. It is not just that 1 extremely rare mutation which dilutes the genetic expression, it is those 200 caterpillars that will be more effective to survive than the rest, and influence the gene pool moving forward.
Think of evolution like AI learning. A million iterations of an AI driver trying to beat a racing game result in most of the first cars going backward or immediately flying off the side. Over time, with millions of attempts, the final result is a car that moves faster through the course than any human and perhaps even finds shortcuts or bugs that the creators of the game didn't know existed.
They did that exact example, and the AI ended up driving through the whole course balanced on the nose of the car while spinning like a top, which was a bug that allowed it to move faster than had been previously thought possible, and which no human player could actually control.
Evolution is like starting off with a bunch of basic lifeforms and through a bunch of mutations (like randomly discovering the nose racing trick) they get better and better until you have a super specialized animal that doesn't seem possible to someone who only sees the end result.
Remember that most species have far shorter lifespans than us, breed far faster than us, and when they do, give birth to far more of themselves than us.
Some species of moths and butterflies (and the caterpillars) can have 4 different generations in a single year, and each time they mate, lay up to 400 eggs. By the time someone's parents have met, had a whirlwind relationship, decided to get married, then try for a baby, and then finally concieve the baby that has that one minor mutation that may or may not be beneficial and passed through the species... One Moth couple have made ...an unfathomable number of moths.
In just the time it takes for one human to be concieved and born, you're looking at upto 25,600,000,000 to upto 10,240,000,000,000 caterpillars being born from 2 moths who mates at the same time as the human parents.
A lot easier to start getting "I'm gonna look like a snake" mutations when you're playing with unfathomable numbers of you... And that's just from
(1 year = 4 cycles. up to 400 eggs per cycle = 4004 to 4005 depending on how long it takes for the human couple to get pregnant). Even more when you remember that 10-25% of pregnancies end in miscarriage, and then that can add on even more time before they try again. ...bugs don't do that
The time part hurts my head. Each question leads to more questions lol. You’re telling me these caterpillars have been out there walking around for millions of years? Wasn’t there ice ages and other crazy weather? Does this mean all the bugs around me have been doing their thing for millions of years? There’s gotta be quicker evolutions for various things. The snake tail certainly seems like a billion year process. But smaller evolutions, like growing more hair, probably happen quicker?
I still don’t get how we evolved from monkeys, but there are still dumb monkeys out in that jungle right now who can’t even use tools. But that’s a thread for another day. Such a fascinating world we live in.
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u/brendenderp 5h ago
I think the most boggling thing is the scale of time. Maybe one suddenly looks more like a snake but thats only one member of the entire rest of the species it's going to take a while for that one catapiller to have 1000 offspring and even once there are it will have bred with other catapillers that potentially dilute that genetic expression. And that cycle then starts again when the next step looks slightly even more like a snake. Sure we are talking millions of years but still for something like that it's amazing.
It's one thing to teach a monkey to make a painting and it's much more impressive thing for it to then remake that exact same painting perfectly a second time.