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6. Creatures like this shake my faith in evolution. Why? It's easy to imagine a couple of touching pieces in the ancestor of the issid that aided in synchroni
by crusso 13y ago
6. Creatures like this shake my faith in evolution.
Why? It's easy to imagine a couple of touching pieces in the ancestor of the issid that aided in synchronizing the jumping mechanics.
Over time, mutations in those touching pieces interlocked more firmly until they resembled what we think of as gears. There was pressure on those mutations to proceed toward gears since the gear mechanism is a potentially successful one for achieving the goal of survival through jumping very far, very quickly.
Evolution has yielded some astoundingly more impressive structures. Take a look at this video that explains your own muscle contractions:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ309LfHQ3M http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ309LfHQ3M
The fact that our brains can pattern match the semblance of gears in the issid with gears that we created is a much more impressive development than the gears of the issid themselves.
- astrodust 13y agoExactly. A single bump on each leg might convey a slight advantage, and then the creature that gets two pairs of bumps that mesh together would be even better off. From there it's just a matter of time before creatures with multiple bumps emerge. Being able to jump quicker than your less-able siblings could convey a huge evolutionary advantage. This quickly weeds out the less-able and strongly encourages this kind of structure to develop once the process has started for whatever reason.
- boldfield 13y agoIt's easy to imagine a couple of touching pieces in the ancestor of the issid that aided in synchronizing the jumping mechanics. Over time, mutations in those touching pieces interlocked more firmly until they resembled what we think of as gears. If this were the case, would you not expect to observe these evolutionary steps in other organisms today? As noted in the article: ...there are many jumping insects like the issus... [though] most other bugs synchronize the quick jolt of their leaping legs through friction... If there are "many jumping" insects, how does it come to be that only a single specie (that we know of, granted) that has evolved this feature, and why have we not observed others undergoing the evolutionary process that could/would yield them in others?
- vdaniuk 13y agoStatistically, it is very likely that at any given point in time there will be only one species with the trait that humans consider significant.
- boldfield 13y agoI'm about to commit an HN faux pax here, but, citation? Off the top of my head I can think of traits which do not fit your assertion: vision in the 390-700nm wavelengths, hair/fur, eye placement (think predator v. prey), etc, etc.
- dragonwriter 13y agoI think GP used significant in a sense more like "newsworthy", in that, ceteris paribus, the perceived significance of a trait is inversely related to the frequency with which it has been seen in the past.
- vdaniuk 13y agoYes, thanks, that's exactly what I meant.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> If there are "many jumping" insects, how does it come to be that only a single specie (that we know of, granted) that has evolved this feature, and why have we not observed others undergoing the evolutionary process that could/would yield them in others? Because evolution isn't planned, it involves selection from randomly[1]-occuring variations each of which has a extremely low probability. Certainly, we see some some traits that arise independently in different populations in different places with similar traits and are preserved and develop in similar ways, but the fact that a feature that contributes to fitness arises uniquely in one place is far from surprising. [1] well, really, many of the processes are highly-chaotic more than random, but that's beside the point here.
- 13y ago