I would suggest that you could get rapid evolution as a result of stress response (on the basis that stress is known to alter DNA). Stress is typically seen as a bad thing in humans (activates disease) but if you’re lucky and a DNA sequence is activated that allows you to cope with the cause of stress… your stress problem is solved, so you survive and get to promote that trait to the next generation.
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That’s a pretty amazing example. Stick insects are pretty amazing, too, and cuttlefish being able to change their color and pattern to match their surroundings are also equally amazing.
I saw a different photo of that fruit fly and it looked more believable. Maybe that first photo just tripped my BS alarm.
Apologies if this has already been said, but I didn’t see it:
The “what good is half a …” is a common fallacy of ID. Part of the answer is “It doesn’t HAVE to be good; it just has to not be bad enough to be killed off before it randomly develops into something that IS good.”
Punctuated equilibrium. Species normally have a considerable amount of variation, most of it fairly irrelevant. Every now and then, either the environment or the variation happens to hit a point where one particular variant is strongly selected for and a new population is selected out of that herd.
Inefficient? Slow? Sure. But given enough time, and enough experiments being run simultaneously (which is the other factor people often forget), you can get pretty good results. AND pretty bad results; life also has enough obvious bad design built into itself to demonstrate that if we had a designer he/she/it wasn’t very intelligent.
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(And I’m completely failing in my efforts not to reply to [quote=“Drabula, post:32, topic:13864”]
As an authority on Intelligent Design [/quote] with “I’m sorry to hear that. There are treatments for that, but it’s not always curable. Good luck.”)
Indeed - I have apparently somehow managed to breed a variety of fruitfly that lives in my bathroom - a decidedly fruit-free zone.
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Woot! Thanks for joining in the conversation. I found your blog entry on a robot-generated Swedish wiki page while trying to make a response to someone complaining about the photos being “faked.” Oh, those Swedish robots and their preternatural proclivity toward citing great stuff.
Anyway, your breakdown is fantastic and really puts this article in context.
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I’ve long held the view that the local squirrels have high capacity for adrenaline production than quiet country squirrels.
Makes sense - animals that first meet unfamiliar threats in a low-threat level environment don’t react fearfully, but after you massacre them for a while, only the scaredy cats are reproducing.
Yar, but why are those particular patterns and shapes more effective across a wider range of sensoria than other particular patterns?
They unquestionably are more effective because of natural selection; but I’m interested in the pattern recognition processing occurring in the nervous systems of the predators, their prey, and perhaps how entrained are those processes by the feedback loop through the mechanism of gene transfer in their also-evolving environment.
They would also need cat-eye bubble windows…
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Now I want a van with compound-eye portholes and a Beelzebub mural on the side, like, sssssoooooooooo mucccchhzzzzz
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Fruit flies, learn this ONE WEIRD TRICK that makes predators in your area soil themselves getting away from you!
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I don’t believe this to be accurate. It hasn’t been “extracted” at all from the mind of the fruitfly. It hasn’t been generated specifically at all.
Most likely, random mutations caused “blotches” occurred on its wing. Which aided survival more than perfectly “clean” wings. Later blotches, which looked more realistic, helped the fruitfly survive better than less realistic blotches-- natural selection was responsible for more realistic depictions, not anything “inside” the fruitfly’s mind.
Edited inept phrasing: nature selection “created” → “was responsible for”
Anyone who starts out with that introduction is about as credible as someone who says:
Edit: Trolled! Trolled again! :shakes fist:
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The " 
" in response to “Joking, right? Right?” indicates sincerity?
Agree with you - but on a mission to slightly reverse the way people express the mechanism of evolution. It’s a passive affair - the species remaining are the few mutations that succeed against the comparatively massive backdrop of immense variety, most of which get shot to pieces in one way or another.
So natural selection doesn’t “create” - it bears witness to survival. Species don’t “evolve”, they’re merely the survivors.
We are educated to use active verbs to describe apparent processes, but evolution isn’t so much a process in the way we think about how things are created…
These flies - some wing-marking mutation kicked off, and kept mutating, but the most convincing images to predators stabilised and remained.
There may well have been a brief few generations where very accurate images of the thing predators fear most was apparent on the wings, but the mutations didn’t stop and that little strand died off.
My point is that there is processing going on in the environment where selection happens.
That processing is, in part, going on in the nervous system of the predator (to take one example), when it does or does not capture the fly.
The mechanism of selection is dependant upon a lot of things but in this particular instance, the vehicles housing the genes are interacting with all of their evolved skill in this one, strongly entrained (and in this case, beautifully signified), arms race.
You may have partially described the scenario and you are not incorrect in describing the mutations that eventually provide useful adaptations to their environment as random.
However, there is selection going on and importantly; it is going on in the nervous systems of the vehicles of the genes that ensure (or fail in) their transfer and propagation into the future, inside a gamete.
So, I think it is interesting to suppose that those arms races may have occurred with more than one species of predator and represent the best fit of more than one species of ant.
The fact that the mutations, harnessed by the evolutionary process, are random seems kinda beside the point.
If you would like to have a debate about the proper usage of the terminology of information replication, I suppose that could be enlightening but perhaps I shall first modify my dialectic for the purpose of clarity. 
It’s sad that the easy availability of internet porn has now made it unlikely that nature will ever evolve the pornofly, which has incredibly detailed pictures of human sex acts on its wing, which inspires horny teenagers everywhere to take care of them and breed them to sell to friends.
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Well, our August Mother of Parliaments is working on that…
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