Fruitfly evolved pictures of ants on its wings

In the chaos is order. There is no difference between ID and evolution. The equation evolves intelligence. Fucking nondualism, bitches.

That’s the same God that made Cymothoa exigua, right? The one that said, “What good is eating half of your host’s tongue, and then latching on to the stump and pretending to be half a tongue?” Obviously, in a well-designed world, parasites would eat the whole tongue before latching on to the stump, and pretend to be the whole tongue, and that’s just the way it is. Amazing.

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As the rule goes, the few mutants that have cross-predator camo survive to leave more offspring.
Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

Show me a real photo, please. Not a mock-up.

Not sure what you mean by “mock-up,” since that is indeed a real photo, but here ya go: http://www.uaebirding.com/forum/showthread.php?5800-ANTS-NO!-Wait-It-a-Fly

You also might do a Google Image search for [Uropyia meticulodina]. Nature is amazeballs.

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Likewise the evolution of eyes themselves - even a simple eye spot is handy for alga that move towards the light. Then organisms with better eyes were able to avoid bumping into things, then they started to be able to distinguish friend from foe. The process led to completely different eyes evolved independently in mammals, molluscs, and insects.

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Joking, right? Right?

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This is simultaneously one of the coolest and one of the most existentially confusing things I’ve seen in a very long time.

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:smile:

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If somebody comes with a good alternative, perhaps it will be worthy of entry in the next Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypothesis…

When threatened, the fly flashes its wings to give the appearance of ants walking back and forth. The predator gets confused and the fly zips off.

The insect version of pocket sand? Sh-sh-sha!

Wouldn’t your God be the only one worthy of that acclamation? As an ‘authority’ on Drosophila melanogaster - meaning someone who spent a hellish semester in genetics class breeding a dozen generations of the little monsters - it’s pretty amazing the amount of mutations they are capable of manifesting in a short period of time. Might I suggest you work on becoming an “authority” in something useful like Biology instead?

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Nope you’re absolutely right. Lets just suspend any rational thought and blame God. Next subject please boingboing! (Were you being sarcastic?)

That being said, i’d like to see more evidence than just these pictures. How do we know these weren’t just painted on? Also i’d like to see how the mechanism works with the ants’ side profile.

Need to see the fly in motion and actually using this mechanism.

Seven With One Blow! Nice work @mtdna, nice work… :wink:

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What about this guy? https://www.google.com/search?q=Uropyia+meticulodina&espv=210&es_sm=119&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=dBJ-UuWJB6rlyQGb8IHYCA&ved=0CDUQsAQ&biw=1041&bih=812

Are you an evolutionist? Your clear statements could be useful around here!

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I think this seems incredible to us because we think of evolution occurring at the speed of the human life cycle, rather than the species at hand. Fruit flies don’t live for 75 years - it’s more like 4-7 weeks. The life span of a human @ 75 years is equivalent to at least 600 consecutive fruit fly life spans (in reality you would get many more generations than that - it all depends on the average point in their life cycle that they breed).

Once you appreciate this, what is incredible is now a lot more understandable. One could ask why they haven’t evolved even more than what they have…

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I had a very interesting discussion with an evolutionary biologist the other day. Smart chap, PhD. About some emerging theories around pre-determined evolution … where an organism has inherited DNA that at one point was active, but is now in hibernation, but comes to the fore in specific situations, like all the water drying up - i.e. that the environmental conditions trigger a mechanism to do that.

It blew my mind. But they’re seeing rapid changes in species in rapidly changing environments, and wondering why.

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That’s what elephants used to say when they heard of men killing their relations with elephant guns.

In many ways, the whole thing is similar to the orchid that xkcd recently waxed about.

One species slowly developing the appearance of another, because of the effect that it has on another species: another species that is tricked into wanting to make love to it, to flee from it, to ignore it (see: twig insects).

And all of these could potentially survive longer than the species they are mimicking, leaving these paintings of another species their only record on Earth.

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I see wut u did thar.

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