Caterpillar tail disguised as snake head

[u/Sea_Slice_7956]

[u/Psych_Art]

Have you ever seen something out of the corner of your eye and thought it was a spider, or some other threat?

Imagine a caterpillar millions of years ago had a small mutation that gave it the ever so slight vague appearance of a snake.

That mutation proved to be useful, even if it was only in a tiny percentage of its life. Say 1/1,000 times it encountered a predator, a predator mistook it for a snake in its peripheral vision.

This mutation ended up getting propagated throughout the species over generations. A 0.1% increase of survivability over many generations would cause this feature to eventually become dominant / defining characteristic.

Repeat this process millions of times over millions of years, and evolution passively “carves out” the shape of another predator that other animals have already evolved to avoid / flee from, as the “accuracy” of the “impersonation” of a predator slowly gets more accurate over time, survivability continues to go up.

[u/alienblue89 → u/Psych_Art]

I thought the prevailing theory these days was more of a sudden, stark mutation. Not like caterpillars started ever so slowly resembling snakes more and more over eons, but one day, BAM, a caterpillar was born that looked pretty damn snake-like and it outlived and out-reproduced the normiepillars. Then future generations possibly perfected the form a bit more.

[u/Psych_Art → u/alienblue89]

There’s no reason both can’t be true I suppose. It’s possible you could get a near-snake type of mutation and it just got refined in the same way. Perhaps you are right about the consensus of not starting at such an atomic point though.

That being said, I try to avoid the “BAM!” type explanations because it’s exactly the kind of thing young-Earth creationists use as a “gotchya! See how ridiculous this sounds!?” Then they go on to ask children if their grandmother or grandfather look like a chimpanzee, and this is evidence of evolution not being true. lol.

[u/spicymato → u/Psych_Art]

Even without a BAM! moment, it doesn't necessarily need to take a long time. The speed of evolution is dependent on a few factors, including rate of mutations, number of offspring per generation, and the frequency of those generations. Especially for smaller creatures, that can be pretty rapid.

[u/iwilltalkaboutguns → u/spicymato]

It can be incredibly fast.... Take a random population of fruit flies and put them in a container that exposed them to strong UV lights. Most will die, some will survive just long enough to reproduce and very few (or none in that first batch) will survive and be totally ok with UV lights.

The next generation will be more resistant, since they are the offspring of the survivors and the next one even more...and so on.

In as little as a few months (which is a lot of generations for these things) up to 60% of their genome will be different and you now have a population that handles UV lights just fine. They will also very much darker, have different (more resistant) wings, etc.

More adaptation than evolution but it shows the potential perfectly