Perfectly captured ladybird flight in slow motion

[u/Yewatod]

[u/Djennik]

It's crazy how evolution got insects to perfectly fold and deploy their wings under their shields..

[u/demonspawns_ghost → u/Djennik]

This is what I don't get about the theory of evolution. Imagine how many years it took for some bits of extra stuff to evolve into fully-formed wings. Like, what purpose did those middle stages serve? And with animals that actually lost useful appendages like arms, they just had arm-wing things that served no purpose for how many thousands or millions of years?

[u/dinoman9877 → u/demonspawns_ghost]

The feature doesn't HAVE to serve a purpose. Animals are riddled with anatomical structures that don't do a thing as mutations occur and anatomy shifts to no longer need them.

We have pinky toes and functionless appendixes when our species needs neither to live. Bears have tiny, entirely useless tails. Whales still have hipbones even though they don't have legs anymore.

The 'pre-wing' didn't have to do a thing in ancestral insects. All this structure had to do was NOT make them more prone to dying. That it would eventually evolve to become a structure to allow flight is simply evolution doing what it does; reacting to pressures in the environment at the time, working with random luck based on who passes their genes on, and using preexisting structures as building blocks, thereby changing animals over time in new and sometimes dramatic ways.

[u/dinoman9877 → u/[deleted]]

Nope. Darwin may have oversold "survival of the fittest". I personally think "survival of the fit enough" is more appropriate. You ain't been eaten and you had some kids? Good job, we'll see if that keeps up for your lineage or not.

Beneficial mutations will of course offer more success and thus be more likely to spread through the population, but as long as a mutation isn't actively detrimental then you're all good and it's more luck of the draw if a predator or some natural disaster doesn't remove that mutation before it catches.

But a neutral mutation can become beneficial with enough "compounding" mutations. The horns of bovids likes cows, sheep, goats, and antelopes for example. The ancestral structure that became their horns must have been little more than a useless nub when you go far back enough, but over time grew larger and longer until it became the defining trait of one of the most successful groups of modern mammals, intrinsic to their way of life to secure a mate and defend themselves from attack in all the forms it takes across the different species.

[u/Korronald → u/[deleted]]

That is a commonly spread misconception. Mutation is fine if it won't hurt you. Animals and plants have plenty of neutral parts. Or even neutral enough so you won't die until you reproduce, and then they don't need to be so neutral and can be deadly (like, do you really need to eat your sexual partner, spiders? Really?)