Pink preying mantis disguises itself as a flower

Honestly, no. Not with the information and evidence we have now, at least. Epigenetics is still very much a form of natural selection. It’s simply that there is an (evolved) mechanism by which (evolved) genes can turn on and off at different times, and (simplistically) that the state of these genes being turned on or off can be passed down to your children.

The big, big, big distinction between evolution and “other” things, like intelligent design, is that the other things assume that there’s some guiding hand somewhere. Be it God or an insect’s desire to look more like a plant.

What evolution says is that there is no specific goal, no drive, no designer. So long as your “other means” that you mention fit in with that, then they probably fit in under natural selection. The problem is that you see a video like this, and your gut tells you that there must be something “extra” guiding that insect to look like a plant. But there really doesn’t need to be. Insects that looked a little like the plant did better. Descendants of theirs that looked a tiny bit more like the plant did still better.

(And most of their descendants did not look “a tiny bit more like the plant.” The majority of them probably looked less like the plant. That’s the big distinction between this and any teleological (guiding) explanations. It doesn’t head in any one direction like it knows where it’s going.)

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