Cornelius Hunter
relates some interesting facts about migratory insects like butterflies:
Anyone who travels much by air knows that pilots try to ride the wind. Flights may even deviate substantially from the shortest-distance route if the wind is strong enough elsewhere. But of course the wind is not likely moving exactly toward your destination. Add to this the fact that the wind also varies with altitude, and the problem of designing the optimal route of flight becomes highly complex.
It is a problem in the calculus of variations (optimizing functionals rather than mere functions) and is analogous to the optics problem of predicting the path of light through a medium with variant refractive index. But this approach requires analytical wind fields, described with functions, rather than numerically derived winds described, for instance, on a grid. In practice the optimal routing problem is solved using various iterative methods. Amazingly, migratory insects also solve this type of problem.
Research using entomological radar has found that migratory insects such as butterflies and moths perform their own flight planning in order to optimize their flights across continents. They select the right time to ride the wind, and they determine the right altitude and flight heading to reach their destination (rather than where the wind is going). As one of the researchers explained:
"Migratory butterflies and moths have evolved an amazing capacity to use favourable tailwinds. By flying at the heights where the wind currents are fastest, migratory moths can travel between their summer and winter grounds in just a few nights."
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| Luna Moth Caterpillar |
This is certainly remarkable, but what's even more remarkable is the fact that butterflies have the ability to migrate and navigate at all. How and why did such a complex behavior arise in such a tiny nervous system? I'm sure it can all be explained by fortuitous genetic mutations being selected for because they conferred a reproductive advantage on the insects that had them.
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| Adult Luna Moth |
I'm sure, too, that lepidopteran metamorphosis can be explained the same way. Somehow caterpillars developed mutations that caused them to spin cocoons around themselves (after they developed the ability to spin out the fibers that make up the cocoon). And then they had more mutations that caused all their tissues to dissociate and migrate around inside the cocoon and then reassemble in the form of a folded-up butterfly. Then more mutations gave the folded up butterfly the ability to break out of the cocoon at just the right time of year and then pump air into the veins in their wings and fly away a completely different creature than they were when they went into the cocoon.
What's that you say? It sounds like a fairy tale? That sort of talk just shows that you don't understand the omnipotent, omniscient character of blind, impersonal, random forces in nature.
