WARNING: Do not tell your fundamentalist/creationist friends this news unless you want to watch their heads explode from all the cognitive dissonance.
It seems that crickets, the noisy little buggers you hear at night throughout this great land of ours, have either been blessed with a genuine act of GOD, or once again have provided more evidence that Darwin’s “theory” of evolution (as amended over time by biologists) just might accurately describe how species change over time. Specifically, crickets in two separate places have either been told to “shut it” by God (hey miracles could happen I suppose, but crickets?), or they evolved to no longer make a joyful noise unto the Lord to protect themselves from predators. From the BBC News online:
To hide themselves from deadly flies, crickets on two Hawaiian islands have evolved an inability to sing.
Ten years ago, two years apart, males appeared on Kauai and Oahu with altered wings, which they would normally rub together to chirp and attract females.
You see, the recent arrival of a particular fly species from North America proved deadly to the crickets on these Hawaiian islands. The flies were exceptionally good listeners. Able to pinpoint the location of the crickets by sound alone, the flies would drop in and lay baby maggots atop the male cricket’s body. Once those little maggots got to work, well, that was all she wrote for the poor male crickets. In about than a week, give or take a few days, the crickets were eaten out husks of their former selves. This obviously forced the crickets to adapt or die out. And “adapt” they did, in fairly quick fashion.
In less than 20 generations, a mutation that leaves males unable to sing spread to over 90% of the crickets on the island of Kauai. […]
Two years after the Kauai discovery in 2003, flatwing crickets were also found over 100km away on Oahu.
What’s even stranger (or not) is that these Hawaiian male crickets on these two islands were “silenced” as it were by two separate mutations according to a study published in the journal “Biology” (citation: S. Pascoal et al., “Rapid convergent evolution in wild crickets,” Current Biology, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2014.04.053, 2014). And apparently these mutations happened completely independently of one another:
The idea that the trait had evolved twice, at almost the same time, seemed far-fetched. “It still seems amazing to me,” Dr Bailey told BBC News.
The first clue was an observation that the mutant, silenced wings on the two islands had two different shapes. […]
[C]omparing a raft of other genetic markers between the two groups yielded convincing evidence that the two mutations had occurred independently.
Can’t wait to hear what explanation the Creationists have for God deciding to cause separate mutations to these Hawaiian crickets to achieve the same result: keeping them quiet. I suspect in this case, we won’t even hear the crickets in their response.
For more details about the Silence of the Hawaiian Crickets go here: Link.
If they don’t get antibiotic resistance, they won’t get crickets’ vows of silence either.
Don’t they concede these points (“microevolution” etc.) these days?
They’ve shifted the sophistry around so that this can happen but the big stuff is still “God,” as far as I know.
Oh so they do the “modified walk back, but your science is still wrong,” eh?
They do the “modified walk back” all the time. i.e. they now accept that the world is warming, but not that it’s caused by humans and/or the burning of fossil fuels; it’s natural and cyclical or sunspots or God playing another trick.
Probably still believe that Bush/Cheney were right about Saddam’s WMD — but he moved, hid, and/or destroyed them before the Yanks got there just to mess with US good intentions.
Do you mean the difference between Evolution and Natural Selection?
Round these parts we’ve noticed a strange rattlesnake and coyote evolution. The rattlers have mostly stopped rattling unless they are pinned in a corner and the coyotes are largely silent when faced with humans. Both critters’ behavior has been explained as a mega adaption (happening must faster than should happen) and is attributed to those that make noise get killed by the humans!
Silence is now a survival mechanism.
Quote: “This obviously forced the crickets to adapt or die out.”
I don’t think this is quite the way to describe it. Crickets weren’t “forced to adapt.” Rather, those crickets that were non-chirpers were more likely to survive than those that chirped. I assume that’s what you were getting at, but the “forced to adapt” phrasing kinda clouds the mechanism.
I refer you to “Alternate Realities: Computer Models of Nature and Man” by John L. Casti. In that book, he develops the matrix differential equation describing Darwinian selection. In a later chapter he develops a Matrix differential equation describing the results of two rational players endlessly repeating a zero sum game. He then points out that the two equations are identical! Of course evolution is not really intelligent (whatever “really” means) but the model of an intelligent designer playing a game with the universe yields exactly the same results. Hence, one can speak of evolutionary strategies.
BTW, faced with these two paradigms, Occam’s Razor would have us choose the simple Darwinian model as it is the simplest explanation.
I wasn’t talking about intelligent design. But I take your point re “evolutionary strategies.” I assume you would agree that “strategy” is more of an after-the-fact descriptor, but I can’t quite tell.
I know you weren’t but I thought you might think I was.
The point being that there is no practical difference. It actually is a refutation of “It’s too complex to be chance.”
When I was a junior in college I wrote a paper that proved that the epicycle system was mathematically equivalent to the Keplerian system (just did a Fourier analysis of Keplerian orbits). Mathematically they are the same but one is hard pressed to explain why epicycles should exist and the forces driving the planets, whereas Kepler’s Laws are directly derivable from Conservation of Angular Momentum and Newtonian Gravity. Why use a complex system when a simple explanation will do? Why use Religion when Scientific observation and Mathematics work as well. We can’t prove that God didn’t create a sequence of life forms, but She’s not necessary.
No, I didn’t think that.
I think we agree. Near as I can tell.
I’m scratching my head, though, over your college paper. Are you saying breaking Keplerian orbits down into a set of trig functions results in something equivalent to the epicycles for those orbits? That’s sorta mind-blowing. Then again, I guess if you assume the epicycles accurately depicted what astronomers were “seeing,” it would kinda have to turn out that way. Still. Wow. How did you even think of doing that?
Yes, that’s exactly it. How did I think of it? I don’t remember. The other result, that Kepler’s Laws have to result from an inverse-square attraction (i.e. Newtonian gravity) was a problem assigned by my Professor.
This.
It’s more likely that crickets that were already unable to make a noise survived, while the noisy ones were eaten.
Not so much “adaptation” as much as a population bottleneck that resulted in the noiseless cricket population becoming the dominant cricket population.
Exactly.
Exactly what would be expected. Mutations interfering with chirping would normally be maladaptive as such mutations would interfere with mating. But the unique selection pressure of the flies makes those crippling mutations more likely to survive than the original genes, hence they spread from generation to generation.
I wasn’t talking about intelligent design. But I take your point re “evolutionary strategies.” I assume you would agree that “strategy” is more of an after-the-fact descriptor, but I can’t quite tell.
Oops. Never mind this comment. It’s a reply to something above.
Hannibal Lecter: You still wake up sometimes, don’t you? You wake up in the dark and hear the chirping of the crickets.
Clarice Starling: Yes.
Hannibal Lecter: And you think if you introduce a new insect predator, you could make them stop, don’t you? You think if the flies lay enough eggs, you won’t wake up in the dark ever again to that awful chirping of the crickets.
Clarice Starling: I don’t know. I don’t know.
Hannibal Lecter: Thank you, Clarice. Thank you.
The big deal here is it was observed in the wild, not the laboratory, where they have been tinkering with fruit fly genes for eons and watching their random mutations appear. Eventually the silent ones will have to succeed without the chirper males they are using to get mates, or the new phenotype will die out.
I’ve actually seen this kind of dynamic in the field with a rare salt marsh snake I did some work on in the early ’90’s: a cross of two species that look like someone had taken one of each species and spliced their halves together. Salt water tidal action was the selective pressure here, where during extended periods of high tides, salt marsh snakes become more prevalent since they can tolerate the salt water, while the fresh water species would retreat from the habitats. There was also a subspecies of salt marsh snake it was breeding with that preferred mangroves to grassy salt marshes, which caused differences in their body patterns that allowed them to blend in with the plants and soil for each habitat. Mangroves in the region were basically controlled by periodic frosts, which would cause the grassy saltmarsh to take over.
What you really want to show as an illustration of evolution in action is some everyday thing, that is in your face. Like dog breeding. Humans are creating their own selective pressures on dogs to create breeds. Ask a creationist how dog breeds are created, and would they say God created the teacup poodle?