Yavimaya wrote:
The black and white thing, with shades of grey making things show up, maybe... im no expert, not somethin i have heard of before. However, most things have colour vision, maybe not all the colours we see, but as far as i know, the ones that have greyscale sight tend to have compound eyes, which dont see enough detail for what you said anyways.... but know knows, TBH, to think a person knows anything about what an animal sees if pretty laughable, we can make educated guesses, nothing more.
As far as the butterflies go, of course the reletives matter, they are basically the same butterfly, but with different colourings, once again, it comes down to naming convention.
But that aside, as hass been stated, it is all very incremental, there is no plan, butterflies with a simple round pattern start to be eaten less, that round pattern has colour variations, the ones that happen to accidently mimmick the colour of eyes do better than 1 single colour, so they survive better.
I dont think there is such thing as "perfect camo" when it comes to nature, those butterflies are no exception, any breaking of pattern and colour gives a camo effect, i did see a small "lizard" face in the 2nd picture you posted, but absolutely nothing in the first, the first looked like a dot with broken camo patterns, nothing more, But that is all that is needed.
the dots were never meant to look like eyes, they simply went that way because the more detail in that dot, the less it looks like a dot, so the more confusing it is to predators, therefore they are less likely to eat that butterfly.
The grey scale thing is incidental - just something I ran across many years back - pretty sure it was before the internet.
The idea it is incremental is not proven - as mentioned above, it is dogma from the Theory of Evolution and the fossil record disagrees with it anyway. There is no difference using that argument as a counter to my question than there is in saying 'that's how God did it' every time someone questions Creation. I am questioning the very idea that incremental changes could have worked in the case of the butterfly, so to counter with saying 'because it is incremental' does not address the question at all.
Situation: We have a butterfly so large it needs camouflage to survive the eagle eyes of its predator. ANY change to that camouflage exposes it. Generations of slowly evolving black dots does NOT help it survive better and therefore, by the rules of the Theory of Evolution, the mutation should die out.
And yet we have Owl Butterflys with perfect reproductions of a predator's eye. The eye works. It has been observed in the wild to work. If the black blotch conveyed any survival benefit we would still see some of them around - that is how Evolution is touted to work. A survival benefit does not automatically remove all those with less of it or none, it just biases the odds.
We appear to be seeing a species that has gone from one level of benefit to another with none of the intervening stages being left behind.
The question is, how could this have come about?
Yavimaya wrote:
No it is not, a bacteria which survives a certain substance will divide into other bacteria that are more likely to survive that susbstance, not other substances.
It is (mostly) directly related to the danger that needs to be survived.
Unfortunately, that is a level beyond what we are talking about. How did that bacterium come to survive when the others didn't? That is where the mutation comes in, not in the act of survival itself.
Unless you are proposing the bacterium somehow changes itself after it survives?
While it is perfectly possible the random changes to the bacterium genome allow it to handle adverse conditions better, it does not answer the question of how a change to a genome can be made without destroying the connection from one DNA 'chain' across to the other.
And there is another issue which I will address in the next post.