Is Evolution Airborn?

[iLoveFlavorfullVaginas]

Okay so....
kinda a weird thread and i'm a lil high

but check dis out
Start at 45 seconds in and finish at 3 minutes in


WTF??

So evolution knows that the snake's main food is a bird, and it understands the distance between a snake that is always on the ground and a bird that flies?

im pretty high right now but damn that's crazy

Is evolution part of being within ourselves that collectively all the snakes understood the distance between a bird and a snake that they collectively knew something like this was needed and then evolution did it's job, and it did it fast like within i dont know how many generations but fast enough to not make all the snakes die?

 

[Professor Emeritus]

For one thing, a lot of exaggerations in that video, so don't believe everything you see.

They used a ton of snake shots in the vid that don't have nothing to do with the island. Only those all-golden vipers are the ones being talked about.

But those vipers really are dense on that island and indeed very deadly, and for the exact reason they mention. Here's how it works.

Remember in any population there's a lot of variation. There are tall people and short people. There are extra venomous lancehead vipers and less venomous lancehead vipers.

A normal viper on the mainland is deadly enough to feast. So the vipers generally live fine, whether they are extra deadly or less deadly. They all get their food.

But for the lancehead vipers that got isolated on this island, prey was limited. Soon any terrestrial prey was wiped out and only birds were left. And a less venomous snake that grabbed a bird but didn't hold on well enough, the bird might fly away, and there goes that meal. So the less venomous ones all starve.

In the end, only the most venomous survive. And they breed together, and some of their children are even more venomous, just like when two tall people have a kid some of their children can be even taller. Those extra-venomous offspring survive the best, have babies, the cycle repeats.

After hundreds of generations, the island would have selected for vipers that were far more venomous than the normal mainland vipers who had been surviving just fine with mediocre venom.

Does that make sense?

 

[Ghost Utmost]

OP

Okay

Slow down Breh

In its most basic form there is no metaphysical shyt involved.

Squirrels (that live near humans) can cross streets pretty well. If they couldn't there would be no squirrels where you can see them.

So once upon a time only 10% of squirrels were good at it. As the 90% came in contact with roads, they died.

Soon half of all squirrels have this skill and finally, all of them have it. Cause the ones that suck at it die.

The children of the street crossing experts inherit their parents skills and so forth.

Multiply by 6433953063 years. Everything you see has developed from very basic microscopic life forms to what you see today. No magic.

But. I think that the emergence of life in the first place and the trajectory it took seems fantastic. Especially DNA forming. That shyt sounds impossible.

The rest seems pretty plausable, but nature is so complex that it makes me wonder how ants can farm and shyt like that.

 

[Yaboysix]

Breh, you had me thinkin snakes learned how to fly out this bytch lol

 

[EBK String]

natural selection is simple, but how those traits emerge in the first place is mind boggling.

 

[koolkeef]

natural selection is simple, but how those traits emerge in the first place is mind boggling.

Fam...

Not to de-rail this thread, but the shyt that really fukks my head up when it comes to evolution is mimicry.

Years ago I was walking up into some restaurant in Henderson, NV and I saw that I thought was a hummingbird feeding on some potted plants sitting by the front door. Never seeing one before in person, I walk up to it to get a closer look. Then I saw the antennae poking out of its head and I jumped the fukk back, LOL. I don't think I had even heard of a hummingbird moth up to then.

If I were a creationist (which I am NOT), this would be the angle of my argument every single time, because I have zero understanding of how some random species - usually an insect - is able to single out a certain other species - oftentimes not an insect - and duplicate its appearance and behavior within any reasonable timeframe or number of generations. If you understand genetics, you know mutations that form into new traits happen totally at random. some succeed, and get passed on to the next generation, some fail and dead-end into some other creature's digestive tract. But where I get really fukked up is on how is it possible through all these random mutations we end up with insects that look like twigs, leaves and fukking flowers, breh...

Because I know these plants aren't passing their genes to these insects to get absorbed into their DNA. Or are they?

I know the creatures that take on these traits benefit from it as camouflage, or to attract prey, or to deter predators, but WTF is the hummingbird moth's purpose??

How does a moth benefit from looking and acting like a hummingbird? Are there animals that love eating moths but hate eating hummingbirds?

I don't get it. shyt is just gonna keep fukking with me.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Fam...

Not to de-rail this thread, but the shyt that really fukks my head up when it comes to evolution is mimicry.

Yeah man, I've seen some of these in real life in the wild before and it crazy.

Here are four that I've seen:

Ant-mimic spider. Spider that looks like an ant so it can blend in with them.

Dead leaf mimic butterfly

This moth is a damn folded up leaf somehow

The insane part is that its wings are flat. It's an optical illusion from the color and shading that makes it look like a folded-up leaf:




Snake mimic caterpillar. I found one basically like this type that I thought was pretty cool:

But it gets its ass kicked in value by these:

A few other good ones are this gecko as a leaf

Octopus pretends to be starfish

Frog mimics moss

Owl that mimics a bigger version of itself. The photo on the right is the same owl from behind...so predators never think they can sneak up on it.

Finally, this just has to be an accident, but these damn beetles look like little fake tortoiseshell jewelry encased in plastic cases

God and evolution make good partners.



Oh, and there's also

Spoiler