14 ms·
Beetle grows ‘termite’ on back to steal food
- beretguy 3y agoNice… hack.
- doitLP 3y agoIt always boggles me how something like this evolves. Isn’t there a very long period (tens or hundreds of thousands of years) where it doesn’t look like the host termites at all? What selective pressures keep it evolving until it looks exactly like the host species? Also why would rove beetles be better at this than others, like the army ant example? Do they just have an extra-evolutionary ability to mimic?
- j_m_b 3y agoEvolution can happen rapidly[1]. All the needed changes could have occurred over just a few generations. It likely starts with chemical mimicry. I can't imagine that it didn't start this way as insects live in an umwelt dominated by chemical sensory input. The beetle is able to easily visit the nest, grab food and not be attacked. Their life cycle becomes more and more intertwined with the termites until they never leave the nest. The beetles whole body starts to transform under evolutionary pressures to produce an additional tactile mimicry. That's my just-so story of how it could happen. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7818422/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7818422/
- bentcorner 3y agoIt also probably works both ways - the termites evolve to better detect parasites, so simple mimicry that worked thousands of years ago wouldn't work today. Similar to the relationship of AV and malware.
- satvikpendem 3y agoOr how GANs work, two networks competing between the generator and the discriminator.
- astrange 3y agoYou can also evolve the ability to evolve rapidly, eg by having areas of "configuration" genes and then "code" genes with more error correction.
- gus_massa 3y agoIt's not exactly what you described, but there are a few weird things. For example microsatelites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsatellite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsatellite that are small repeated regions in genes, that are difficult to copy, so they have a bigger mutation rate. They can function as tweaking knots when you consider times that involve many generations.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago> It also probably works both ways - the termites evolve to better detect parasites, so simple mimicry that worked thousands of years ago wouldn't work today. This might or might not be true. Birds are a good example - they are subject to parasitic mimicry. One problem that a bird might have is that another bird lays one or more eggs in the first bird's nest. Theoretically, the victim bird will then incubate the egg and potentially feed and rear the nestling as if that nestling were the bird's own child. There are several points in this process where the victim has the opportunity to defend itself: - Ducks (at least some kinds) recognize the threat that another duck will lay an egg in their nest, and will fight approaching ducks to prevent them from doing this. But once the parasitic duck manages to get an egg into a victim's nest, the victim is not able to detect the foreign egg, and is stuck incubating and raising the adoptive duckling. - Some birds learn to recognize their own eggs. If they come home and find a foreign egg in their nest, they will dump that egg onto the ground. - Birds could theoretically be able to recognize nestlings of their own species. This would not help the ducks from the first example, who are victimized by their own kind. But it would help birds to defend themselves against cuckoos (and similar parasites), who lay their eggs in the nests of other species of bird. I am not aware that any species of bird has actually developed this defense, though I wouldn't be surprised if some have. Anyway, what's relevant here is that all of these defenses have failed to develop in large numbers of birds that are subject to the relevant pressures. It's definitely possible that the same simple mimicry that worked 100,000 years ago works just as well today. But it's also possible that there's been an arms race.
- EGreg 3y agoSomething really makes me question all just-so stories. It’s not science. It paints a target around an arrow, the arrow being that all speciation must occur through random mutation and natural selection. Basically, the theory is unfalsifiable. It violates what Karl Popper was talking about. Now, don’t get me wrong. The theory of common descent is falsifiable. The phylogenic tree can be discerned. But the idea that we have discovered all the mechanisms by which speciation (or “macroevolution”) has ever occurred despite never having seen any of them in practice, is in my opinion bad science. And just-so stories are almost self-admitting that it’s more folklore than science. If you think I’m being too heterodox with my opinions, consider the just-so stories in the field of evolutionary psychology and extrapolate to all the phenotypes that are being described. But actually it seems worse than that because the math doesn’t seem to work out. What evolutionary advantage does a wing give before you can even glide? In the generations where it doesn’t accomplish much, it would seem that a random mutation would be far mord likely to disappear than take over a population. A mutation like proto—wings is likely to be extremely rare while the individuals’ genetic fitness may have increased by say 10%, although that is extremely generous considering the proto-wing confers no advantage and might be seen as freaky and unusual by the mates in the intermediate state. But even with an increase in genetic fitness, it is a tiny tiny effect. For it to take over the entire population eventually, or create a major branch within the population that has some “Lamarckian” direction towards a fully-working wing, seems extremely far-fetched.
- jakear 3y ago[flagged]
- koliber 3y agoThe word "falsifiable" does not mean the thing that you are using it for. It sounds like you are using it to mean "it was proven wrong." When talking about theories, a theory that is not falsifiable is one that could not be ever proven wrong. The best theories are falsifiable, but have a lot of evidence pointing for the theory, and little or no against it.
- 3y ago
- gorkish 3y agoThank you for “umwelt”.
- qup 3y agoSeconded, have never run across that word in all my reading.
- jibal 3y agoHere's where I encountered it: https://www.npr.org/2022/06/21/1105793891/ed-yong-an-immense-world-animal-senses https://www.npr.org/2022/06/21/1105793891/ed-yong-an-immense...
- qup 3y agoThanks! > Made famous by zoologist Jakob von Uexkull in 1909, the term Umwelt refers to the perceptual world experienced by each animal, a highly specific kind of "sensory bubble." When we walk our dog and she stops to smell every other bush or car tire, she's taking in through her acutely sensitive nose smells that we take in faintly or not at all. That's because humans and dogs have two different sensory bubbles, or Umwelten. Umwelten! <3
- jabiko 3y agoAs a German speaker it felt really weird reading it. Like your brain is in English mode, reads over the word, then backtracks, switches to German, reads it again and then continues with English.
- huijzer 3y agoI have a lot of appreciation for some specialized German words, such as Fingerspitzengefühl, Wanderlust, Zeitgeist, or Schadenfreude, but why Umwelt? It can just be translated to environment.
- james-bcn 3y agoit is the environment _as experienced_ by an organism. Me and my dog can have the same environment, but we'll have different umwelt, because mine is primarily visual but his has a much larger scent component.
- yieldcrv 3y agoI’m willing to entertain a dash of Spontaneous Generation alongside selective pressures
- intrasight 3y agoGod having fun with Blender
- phito 3y agoEvolution is much smarter than just random mutations
- lusus_naturae 3y agoEvolution is a population level effect and doesn't have a plan or scheme, it's whatever helps reproduction.
- phito 3y agoIt doesn't stop it from being smart at solving problems.
- SteveNuts 3y agoIsn't it just random?
- lusus_naturae 3y agoBut that's the point though, it's not trying to solve anything. The biological impetus to survive is individual, and we see some emergent property of survival instincts in the development and existence of groups, societies, culture, etc. In non-human animals, there are lots of example of cooperation and symbiosis. All this to say that problem solving is a biological problem, not an evolutionary problem. There are pressures that favor some traits over others, and then we have population level effects, but the development of traits is inherently random.
- jcims 3y agoI’ve always had a notion that there’s some kind of gene theft with mimicry. The combinatorics of just rattling genes into existence that build a mock termite larva seem infeasible in the timescale involved. What does the math look like? How many possible gene configurations are there that will build a mock termite on the back of a beetle? What’s the shortest random walk to get there from a beetle with no termite on its back and how does that compare with the total number of these beetles ever created in nature? A single gene might have 4^300 configurations. Are there five genes or fifty or five hundred involved? How many of these beetles have ever been built? 10^20?
- shellfishgene 3y agoAs development works in stages based on the last one, I would assume gene theft just doesn't work on a beetle genome background. You would have to change development from the egg onwards to mimic the termite, essentially turning the beetle into a termite proper.
- phito 3y agoThe genome does not store a map of the final organism, so it seems unlikely.
- legulere 3y agoIt’s not just the beetle that evolved but the termites as well. It probably started out with the termites being pretty bad at detecting their kind and becoming progressively better because of the pressure of that beetle stealing their food.
- slavetologic 3y agoI don't believe that evolution is a random walk. There's clearly momentum based factors
- mjan22640 3y agoSince the discovery of DNA we build up the common knowledge that "it is all in the DNA", and the basis of evolution is a random change in DNA. It was due to a selection bias, DNA is a static structure that sits there and waits to be studied while the nano processes in a cell were impenetrable until fairly recently. DNA only contains templates for proteins. It does not contain informtion how to assemble the molecular machines from the proteins, or how "to be alive" in general. A cell is a fairly intelligent problem solver, that can adapt and chang during its lifetime, it does not need to wait for a mutation to occur. There is heritable information outside of DNA, that is epigenetic in its nature. In a multicellular organism this information is communicated and shared between cells. A beneficial DNA mutation is like a lottery win. It might be viable strategy in viruses an bacteria, who divide at an astronomical speed. A multicellular organism gametes divide only a handfull of times per generation. These need to put a more concerted effort, than a random chance, to score.
- ampdepolymerase 3y agoNo, no, no. Explanation is inaccurate. The central dogma is the central dogma because information flow is primarily one way (yes there are exceptions i.e. epigenetics but primary information flow is from DNA to protein) and this is the fundamental tenet underpinning our current understanding of biology. > A multicellular organism gametes divide only a handfull of times per generation. That's what recombination is for during sexual reproduction. > It does not contain informtion how to assemble the molecular machines from the proteins, or how "to be alive" in general. Unless you subscribe to the creationist or Larmarckian schools of thought, this is flat out wrong. DNA polymerase and similar analogues like reverse transcriptase do not exist in a vacuum. There are entire branches of evolutionary biology dedicated to studying their formation. The main transcription proteins, helicase, polymerase, and ribosomes can all be assembled from the basic proteins they themselves transcribe. (Incidentally figuring out the ultimate structure that a protein chain assembles into is what AlphaFold does, bioinformatics and ML's crowning jewel) > There is heritable information outside of DNA, that is epigenetic in its nature. When biologists refer to epigenetics, they mean information carriage that's not strictly tied to the nucleotides. This doesn't meant DNA isn't involved. Most epigenetics I can think of off the top of my head all involve the DNA transcription mechanism in some way.
- tomcam 3y agoAll the answers you got are fairly state of the art, but it’s mostly descriptive. Very little testable or otherwise falsiable information. The more we learn about developmental biology the more baffling the origin of cellular behavior becomes.
- hyperthesis 3y agoIt needn't be perfect at first, just better than nothing (fool some of the eyes, some of the time e.g. in low-light conditions) and a gradient. See Richard Dawkins' chapter "Do good by Stealth" in River Out of Eden https://wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Out_of_Eden#Do_good_by_stealth https://wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Out_of_Eden#Do_good_by_stea...
- shellfishgene 3y agoJust imagine the first rove beetle was adapted to be a predator of social insects. It runs to the colony and tries to grab some eggs. It's often detected and killed. So maybe by chance one beetle has a mutation that makes one of its pherhormones (or whatever) smell slightly more like termite. It's a bit less likely to get killed by the termites, so it has an advantage and higher reproductive success. The new genes spreads through the population. The another one gets a mutation that makes it's antennae just a bit more termite-like... You get the idea. Why rove beetles? No idea, but maybe their body plan was for some reason more adaptible to change morphology? Also maybe because they were closely associated to colonial insects from the beginning as predators, and so had high selective pressure to avoid detection.
- yalogin 3y agoI have the same questions, more so because if it happens over a long time it’s not sustainable. The beetle population can be in some weird in-between state which could be tough for their survival.
- gus_massa 3y agoTotally unsupported hypothesis: They evolved first a big fat termite ass, that is much easier and it's probably good enough many times in the dark narrow alleys of a termite hive. Later they evolved the decoration. It would be nice to see how the beetle grows, because "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" is not exact, but sometimes is a good approximation.
- ajuc 3y agoThere's no incentive for termites to be good at distinguishing impostors before there are impostors. So they could get away with very bad disguise at first, then arms race started.
- HelloNurse 3y agoThere's also the separate evolutionary axis of how the beetle behaves: they learned to seek out termites and collect food from them, exposing themselves to quick lynching if the disguise fails. It's easy to imagine intermediate states where mediocre disguises work some of the time and the beetle is cautious because it occasionally needs to run away.
- melagonster 3y agoactually this is a cool question, biologists always try to reply these questions. but this is a new species...
- zzzbra 3y agoI'm amazed that we're always only just finding out about this sort of thing... like today. the way it gets reported makes it feel like it's some sort of new innovation that the beetle just came up with, but it really impresses upon you just how much more weirdness nature must have in store for us just in our own backyard.
- bpodgursky 3y agoThere really aren't that many people studying insects. Even fewer studying and cataloging plants. Everyone assumes there's some large academic cohort of etymologists that are busy indexing and recording all natural insect life, but it's usually just some guy paying attention to one thing at a time. And sometimes there are whole families of animals or plants where there's no guy at all.
- eru 3y ago> Even fewer studying and cataloging plants. Depends. Agriculturally important plants (and their pests of all kinds, including other plants) do get a lot of attention.
- DonHopkins 3y agoCrime pays but botany and entomology don't. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFScyio4lwI&t=752s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFScyio4lwI&t=752s
- omnicognate 3y agoI expect there are very few etymologists studying insects, but more concerningly there aren't enough entomologists doing it either [1]. [1] https://time.com/5144257/fewer-scientists-studying-insects-entomology/?amp=true https://time.com/5144257/fewer-scientists-studying-insects-e...
- bpodgursky 3y agooops
- colordrops 3y agoWith things like extraterrestrial beings and ghosts and whatnot, we have no evidence of other examples. But mimicry like this is abundant in the animal kingdom. Who's to say that some "humans" walking among us are not just appendages of some other form of life that evolved here as well?
- eru 3y agoAre you willing to bet? I'd give you a million to one odds against that. More precisely to operationalise: against that being discovered to be the case in the next twenty years. The way evolution and biology works, what you are suggesting is extremely unlikely. (See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pLRogvJLPPg6Mrvg4/an-alien-god https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pLRogvJLPPg6Mrvg4/an-alien-g... for a start of an explanation.)
- NotSuspicious 3y agoI'll take the bet.
- colordrops 3y agoI don't see anything in that article that challenges anything I said. If there was a mechanism by which mimicking humans helped this creature reproduce, then it would fit the scientific model of evolution. Also, it was a bit of a whimsical fantasy rather than some serious theory I have about the world. In any case, even if such beings were to exist, I suspect we'd not be able to detect them any more than the termites would be able to detect the beetle. We probably wouldn't have the faculties to comprehend and apprehend the nature of the being, any more than an ant could understand general relativity. It's kind of tiring having habitual iconoclast skeptics come out of the woodwork with some superficial dunk every time something out of the ordinary but also of no real consequence is said.
- nprateem 3y agoPut me down for £2, and I'm pretty confident. I work with some characters who have evolved to mimic productive workers while never producing anything of any discernable value.
- selcuka 3y ago> The termite “puppet” may help the beetle evade detection—though termites are blind, they sense one another through touch. Something doesn't sound about right [1]. If termites are blind why would the beetle evolve to the point it replicates the look of the termite so precisely, down to the colour? There must be another advantage, possibly when interacting with another, non-blind species. Update: Apparently another beetle has been successfully doing the same without needing to mimic the look, but only by secreting similar chemicals [2]. [1] Disclaimer: Layman comment [2] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22526-zoologger-the-beetle-with-a-handle-on-its-back/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22526-zoologger-the-b...
- eru 3y agoThe colour replication might be a co-incidence?
- joebob42 3y agoOr alternatively, those colors are good for a beetle with a termite on its back for the same reason they're good for a termite. They help whatever the termite looks like blend in to the area where termites usually are.
- qup 3y agoOr a result of diet.
- selcuka 3y agoThe beetle itself has a different colour than the puppet, though.
- itsme5trange 3y agoMaybe the beetles don't know that the termites are blind?
- javajosh 3y ago
- totallywrong 3y agoThis is really something. I can't begin to understand how a tiny insect can evolve a puppet that looks exactly like another insect.
- shellfishgene 3y agoI addition to coming up with an idea of the steps involved you have to consider the time this takes. You always read about some millions years, but if you stop and think about how many generations of the beetle this is and how this is a really, really long time, it makes more sense.
- lproven 3y agoThe world is very old. Life is ancient. It took over a billion years just to invent photosynthesis, then another billion-odd to invent the efficient oxygen-generating kind of photosynthesis... then that killed almost everything and the whole thing sort of rebooted. The world froze for a billion years, then thawed, and then another floating single celled bacterium-like thing invented the idea of enclosing another bacterium thing as its "lung", its power plant... then after another billion years, they somehow came up with the plan of sticking together in clumps. And then, after 4 billion years of nothing much happening, but happening very slowly, half a billion years ago these clumps of cells started an arms race, and boom, in the blink of an eye, not that anything had come up with eyes or eyelids yet, there were millions of types of multicellular clumps growing in the sunlit water, or eating the growing clumps, and eating each other, and trying not to be eaten, and in a moment, there is an ocean full of squirming wiggling swimming fighting things. Out of which, half a billion years later, we evolved. Then we killed everything else except for a handful of stuff we eat. Then, we die. The very sad, pathetic thing about religious "creationism" is that they think their version is more amazing, more beautiful, more pleasing... because they are ignorant of the size and scale and complexity of the real thing. They are a small circle of people with their head down admiring a pebble that one of them is holding, exclaiming at its beauty, while they are standing in a building the size and complexity and wonder of a thousand cities -- that they have not noticed is there. Then they press the plunger down on the detonator and blow the whole thing up, not realising it will fall on their heads and kill them because they didn't see it.
- ryanblakeley 3y agoThat is an incredibly cool discovery. Another weird body hack in Northern Australia Hymenoptera is the honey pot ant. Their replete caste are passive food storage containers.
- ggm 3y agoThe species co-evolved? I am assuming the early "I am a termite" mimicry wasn't very good, but neither was the termites 'not a termite' detection logic and so each incremental step of the way over 100,000+ years of evolution, they co-evolved to believe this mimicry, at a high level. Neither party can entirely "win" in this model. At best, they get some marginal benefit in a predator/prey/host model which alters the cyclical swings of which species is higher or lower in the equipoised outcome. Over the next 1000 years, it swings the other way.
- DonHopkins 3y agoMaybe the beatle gives its hosts good Yelp reviews in return.
- shellfishgene 3y agoThe borders between parasitism and beneficial symbiosis can be fluent. Maybe if another parasite arises (say, some mite), it's in the beetle's interest to defend "its" termine colony against it, and it may have better ways of doing it because the mite evolved only with termites as hosts.
- linguistics__ 3y agoIt's also worth taking the "Life/dinner principle"[0] into account. If the termites fail to detect the beetle, then they might loose a tiny bit of food or whatever. While if the beetle fails to deceive the termites it might get killed or starve. Hence the adaptive pressure is probably higher for the beetle than for the termites. 0: The name comes from the example: the rabbit runs faster than the fox, because the rabbit is running for its life, while the fox is running for its dinner.
- achenet 3y agoI'm not sure the "life/dinner principle" is always applicable. A cheetah runs faster than a gazelle. And if you consistently fail to catch your dinner, you're probably going to lose your life.
- 3y ago
- yakorevivan 3y ago[dead]
- Nezghul 3y agoWouldn't it be easier to just... look like a termite instead of having abdomen looking like a termite?
- shellfishgene 3y agoMaybe not! That would require changeing the whole development of the beetle, and maybe the intermediate stages would not be beneficial. To give a terrible example, if you have a car and need a camper, you could rebuild the car into a camper but you would have to change everything and would not have a useable car for a long time. If instead you bought a trailer with a tent on it, you could build a perfect camping trailer over time step by step and have still use the car.
- edoardo-schnell 3y agoSo, this is how termites see themselves...?
- rendall 3y agoIs it possible - and bear with me, here - that we humans have something similar in our midst? Something that has co-evolved mimicry over eons to bypass our "other" triggers. No uncanny valley or creepy vibe detected. A kind of Cuckoo bird for humans.
- INTPenis 3y agoIf evolution is just nature throwing dice, then it would take many, many generations to evolve something that complex. I think we see more of these interesting finds in the world of small animals because they have a much higher frequency of turnover. Therefore a higher statistical probability to produce interesting adaptations. I'm just a layperson so I'm using my own terminology here. Then there's the other interesting possibility, that there is some way to consciously influence the evolution of DNA. I mean it's pretty freaky that this beetle evolved an exact replica of a termite, a creature it presumably spends a lot of time around. How did its DNA "know" to evolve in that diretion? Are there thousands of beetles out there with half assed copies of termites on their backs?
- rendall 3y ago> I think we see more of these interesting finds in the world of small animals because they have a much higher frequency of turnover. Therefore a higher statistical probability to produce interesting adaptations. This is the best argument against so far. Still, if a species co-evolved alongside us since our ancestors were small furry animals, this would be quite a few generations.
- ftxbro 3y agoI heard a theory that domestic cats mimic human babies.
- INTPenis 3y agoOr you can flip that and say; humans domesticated cats because they sound similar to human babies.
- 3y ago
- _a_a_a_ 3y agoThat is absolutely astonishing, but something bothers me, I thought termites were blind and it says they are and rely on smell: > though termites are blind, they sense one another through touch. The beetle may also absorb unique chemicals called cuticular hydrocarbons from the termites or produce similar compounds in order to enhance the perception that it is a termite as well. So I would have expected a fake termite to be just the crudest impression but with great odour mimicry, but this visual mimicry is so incredible it suggests termites visual perception is better than we expected, or perhaps something else is going on. TL;DR something doesn't add up here
- lproven 3y agoThey don't see. So they feel. It has to feel right as well as smell right.
- _a_a_a_ 3y ago> It has to feel right I'm not aware of any work/research on this. Does seem reasonable though. But the rest of the insect is much larger and non-termitey, so...? (edit: so... why don't they attack/reject it?)
- lproven 3y agoWell by way of a disclaimer, this isn't my research, and my biology BSc was more than a third of a century ago, so all I was offering was a general comment. But if Animal A is mimicking Animal B, and B is blind but uses scent/taste and touch, then we can safely deduce that looking right is not important... And we can safely assume that there is no miraculous intervention. (If someone can't safely assume that, then they're religious and no argument will dissuade them. If it were a deity, which it wasn't, then they could make a more convincing looking fake!) So, aside from odours, pheromones etc., then we just have to consider what's left. And that is touch, so it seems probable that feeling right is important.
- AltruisticGapHN 3y agoAnd people tell me the universe is not intelligent. I think what scares us is that intelligence, like _real_ intelligence, is prior to thought and so it seems almost alien and incomprehensible to us. Yet these creatures clearly know what they are doing at some level. Just as we know what we are doing with our lungs, heart, nervous system etc. that evolved over thousands of years, but we don't know it in thought - so it eludes us as something external.
- jibal 3y agoThe universe indeed is not intelligent. Nor do these creatures know what they are doing. Nor did evolution know what it was doing when it created them -- evolution is not an agent or even an entity, its a description of a natural process of highly constrained brute force trial and error. With a proper scientific and biological education these things are neither alien nor incomprehensible and the numerous conceptual errors above can be avoided.
- jibal 3y agoP.S. Both of the responses include additional conceptual errors (or worse: bad faith). e.g. one can always find someone with credentials (often irrelevant, as here) on YouTube in support of one's beliefs. And as for "If you treat it as if it's is you get the exact same result though" -- this simply isn't true -- not yet, anyway. And if it ever is true, one would need extreme justification to claim the AI isn't conscious. In any case, this has nothing to do with whether the universe is intelligent--after all, we already know that it contains intelligent creatures (surely some humans are).
- hackeraccount 3y agoThis reminds me of an AI that passes the Turing test. Of course it's not conscious. If you treat it as if it's is you get the exact same result though. At some point the similarities between the metaphor "the Universe is intelligent" and the actual Universe are so small that there are effectively no conceptual errors.
- AltruisticGapHN 3y ago
- ultim8k 3y agoOh those little mofos!
- Borrible 3y agoCoevolution in an arms race for surface/tactile mimicry. The basic blueprint of an insect is already present in the predator. The first of their kind may have been deformed Siamese twins.
- emadda 3y agoI wonder if it is possible an animal can edit its own DNA based on things it observed with its senses in the environment. Eg Beetle observes kin dying via termite melee, encodes a potential solution in the DNA for the next generation.
- LeifCarrotson 3y agoThis might (eventually, pending MAJOR ethics committee issues) be possible for humans in a lab. It's not realistic for beetles.
- hackeraccount 3y agoRead about epigenetics. It's not quite as magic as what you describe but it's in the ballpark.
- victorbjorklund 3y agoWow. Evolution is pretty amazing.
- olwmc 3y agoGradient: Descended