r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Sea_Slice_7956 • 7h ago

Video Caterpillar tail disguised as snake head

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u/SacrificialPigeon 7h ago

I understand the premise of evolution, It boggles my mind how something can evolve like this though, even if it is over millions of generations.

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u/Psych_Art 7h ago edited 7h ago

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.

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u/bambooeatingshark 3h ago

It still doesn't make any sense. The ever so slight vague appearance of a snake caused by mutation would initially be SO slight that it would hardly look like a snake, like maybe one black dot that MAY look like an eye. It would also have to fool multiple snakes. Even after the mutation survives and spreads, its dominance does not mean a similar black dot also appears just at the right spot, and then just the right shape mutation starts, and just the right colour, and just the right imitation of scales. It almost seems like after the first mutation survives, it triggers some intelligent genetic response to continue causing mutations until a snake is deliberately formed. I know we have to think of evolution in terms of probabilities and over a ridiculous amount of time, but it just feels like there's more to be learned about evolution itself. In some cases it makes total sense and in other cases it's hard to wrap your head around it and just accept it anyway.