Evolution is not only bloody in claw and tooth, to mutilate an old saying, but deceitful as well. NewScientist (18 March 2017) reports on just how far some beetles will go for a steady supply of food:
IT’S quite a ploy. Rove beetles blend seamlessly into army ant societies, but instead of helping out, they devour the young of their unsuspecting companions.
The deceit is so successful that it has evolved independently in at least 12 parasitic rove beetle species – a phenomenon called convergent evolution. In each case, the beetles’ entire body shape has evolved to resemble the army ants they prey on, and they smell and act like the ants too. They even go marching on raids with them. …
[Joseph Parker at Columbia University] says the finding challenges arguments by palaeontologist and author Stephen Jay Gould and others that different creatures would evolve if the evolutionary clock was restarted from scratch.
Instead, it suggests that evolution may take similar and predictable paths whenever a certain scenario arises. In this case, distantly related beetles first prey on army ants directly, but later evolve to sneak into the army itself (Current Biology, doi.org/b2vj).
If evolution is less vulnerable to stochastic processes than supposed, as Professor Parker suggests, it may also mean that, given a symbol and operation set more or less isomorphic to the relevant realities, it may be possible to calculate to some surprising level of precision the path evolution will take for some given set of starting species. I’m not enough of a logician to guess whether or not mathematics provides enough power to do the job.
And not a clue as to how many computer cycles it would take. But it sounds like a fascinating project – I wonder how many PhDs and doctoral students are working on this question right at this moment.
