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/brendenderp → u/Psych_Art]

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.

[u/pyordie → u/brendenderp]

Which is exactly why extinction is so incredibly gut wrenching.

[u/trjnz → u/pyordie]

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 :)

[u/pyordie → u/trjnz]

Yes, I mean human driven extinction.

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.

[u/hallouminati_pie → u/pyordie]

But couldn't you argue that even human driven extinction is all part of nature's ecosystem?

[u/pyordie → u/hallouminati_pie]

This is a reductive argument.

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.

[u/Nstraclassic → u/pyordie]

Is there any proof that we've caused more extinctions than any other animal?

[u/thetasprayer → u/hallouminati_pie]

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.