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Cockroaches Evolving To Avoid Roach Motels
sciencehabit writes "Only a few years after roach motels were introduced in the 1980s, they lost their allure for an increasing number of German cockroaches. Researchers soon realized that some roaches had developed an aversion to glucose—the sugary bait disguising the poison—and that the insects were passing that trait on to their young. Now, scientists have figured out how this behavior evolved."
Maybe soon they will learn an aversion to everything in my house. Then they can live outside and we will all be happy.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
That Intelligent Designer is a crafty one! You'll never best his cockroaches!
IDers accept microevolution.
Use high fructose corn syrup in the roach motels instead of glucose. I'm surprised they don't do this already, since they use it in everything else.
I noticed the roaches weren't going for it, so I added a sign to it: "Free Continental Breakfast, Free Wifi".
Which just makes them more illogical, not less. For example, I accept that I live in my mother's basement, but I don't accept that I will never get a date. Yet the latter is a consequence of the former.
That Intelligent Designer is a crafty one! You'll never best his cockroaches!
IDers accept microevolution.
Do they? Back before they got pwned all their marquee arguments[*] took the form of "this-or-that-structure-or-system could not have evolved".
If you want to defend them, maybe you should clarify what definition of microevolution they accept, and what other flavors of evolution they reject.
[*] Except for Dembski's "no free lunch" argument that evolution doesn't work any better than blind chance, which of course would apply to microevolution as well as to any other flavor.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Seriously, did the roaches actually evolve and pass it to their young, or did the specific roaches which HAD the sugar aversion trait simply avoid being poisoned and passed along said aversion to their offspring?
I'm kinda thinking it's the latter.
I'm kinda thinking that's evolution.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
...just to stay in the same place. Natural selection follows from basic principles of logic. It's so close to first principles that it always amazes me that we had to wait so long for Darwin to show up and slap humanity on the face with the simple truth of it. Living things exist because they inherited what it takes to exist from their ancestors. The ones that didn't have what it took to stay in existence...didn't. The world is full of things that exist. Protons, stars, iron, roaches, people. Natural selection acts on everything. The universe itself may even have been "selected" through some process of cosmogenesis where universes that don't have what it takes, physical laws and constant appropriate to produce stars, black holes, daughter universes, see their lineage die off. Hard to prove, probably impossible, but it is not even a new idea to think natural selection is too powerful and too basic to reality to be confined to biology.
Unless you can eradicate an entire species quickly and completely, all you do is set up a selection pressure which favors mutant individuals who have what it takes to beat your attempts to eradicate them. The ones that don't have what it takes to counter your attack, roach motel or whatever it is, don't survive, and don't pass on their genes which failed to adequately equip them for survival and reproduction.
Arthropod life cycles are very fast so it's not even surprising to see evolution like this happening in just a few decades. I'm surprised it hasn't happened sooner.
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I just can't believe how many such comments I'm seeing here. Where are the nerds?!
Selective breeding is based on positive feedback, where a human being selects the specimens with a desired trait and breeds them to get more of the same trait in the next generation. That's how you get house pets that do not stand a chance of survival in the wild.
What happened with the cockroaches is the same process conducted by mother nature; only the surviving ones can breed.
Now, here's the kicker for all of you high school dropouts. Both cases are essentially evolution according to the definition in wikipedia.
There's really no distinction. What is called macro evolution is determined by hindsight, usually because we are only able to compare fossils separated by millions of years. By definition every organism is a member of the same species as its parents. We only place them into discrete categories for taxonomical convenience. It's not a fact of nature, it's a human contrivance to make doing (some aspects) of biology easier.
It's like natural languages. I speak English, a Germanic language. I can speak to my father and mother just fine. I can speak to my grandfather, and also converse in German with him. If my great-grandfather were still alive I'd doubtless have no trouble speaking to him, too. He could speak to his parents. They could speak to their parents, and so on. Each person in the chain can speak to and understand the people directly around them. But if you go back just a few hundred years, I wouldn't be able to easily converse with my ancestors, despite the fact that there is an unbroken chain connecting them to myself linguistically. Farther back and I wouldn't even recognize the language they're speaking as English, or German. So from microevolution comes macroevolution of languages.
So to with biology. If we had access to a fossil or living specimen of every intermediary individual from single cell to human then the very idea of species would become meaningless, lost in the smooth gradient of gradual change. You could line them all up and walk down the line and see them change, almost imperceptibly from one form into another. Every individual would look so much like his parents and offspring that you wouldn't even be able to tell there was a change at all. But you could compare every 10, 100, or 1000 individuals and see that they are in fact changing. At some point they'd be so different as to need a new name, for humans have an almost pernicious compulsion to place things into discrete categories.
Some people find it impossible to break out of this mindset. Some find that their religion even compels them not to try.
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If they've upped their standards and don't like motels, we'll have to increase our efforts, and create roach B&Bs.
IDes can accept evolution...the only thing they don't accept is that life on the planet was not in some way fashioned for some particular purpose (which was presumably either already fulfilled long ago, or hasn't been completed yet, or else has been completely forgotten about)
And now we have yet another variant of ID, and this version is so vague that it isn't even clear what the point is. Sometime there may ave been a purpose at some point- and this is supposed to be a scientific hypothesis?
But let's look at what the ID proponents actually say.. The primary ID textbook, Of Pandas and Peoples rejected evolution. Of course this is the book that apparently had a litera search and replace from "creationist" to "intelligent design proponents" leading to among other fun bits leading to the infamous ""cdesign proponentsists" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Pandas_and_People#Pandas_and_.22cdesign_proponentsists.22. But let's look at what other ID proponents have said. Michael Behe accepts most of evolution, except for apparent occasional tinkering. His primary example is malaria so you could summarize his views as "There is a designer and he's a bit of a dick". William Demski used to be ok with an old Earth but now questions that and believes in a literal global flood http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_A._Dembski#Southwestern_Baptist_Theological_Seminary_flood_controversy. Paul Nelson is a straight out YEC while claiming that that view isn't common among IDers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Nelson_(creationist). Etc. Etc. Ad infinitum et nauseam
ID exists to disguise creationism as something more palatable to be taught in schools or discussed by respectable people. But the proponents aren't very good at having anything like a coherent hypothesis, with each of them trying to decide just how vocal a creationist they'll be and which parts of science they'll reject. ID was made to try to infiltrate public schools under the guise of science, and it shows.
Darwin actually called it evolution through the mechanism of natural selection. Evolution is the observation; natural selection is the mechanism whereby certain genes get "selected" for over the generations. The origin of the diversity of the genes is not covered by either term.
Those glucose-aversion genes had to come from somewhere. They may have come from mutation, or crossed from another species, or whatever. Whether they lay "dormant" (that is to say, unselected for) in the genome for centuries, or years before the environmental change that caused them to become beneficial is irrelevant.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Mutations are random, and most aren't improvements, aren't adaptive. Natural selection then goes to work. The mutations which are better become more numerous by virtue of being better. Detrimental changes terminate the organism's lineage by killing it outright or making it less successful at reproducing. Drop a bacterium into a pond and after a billion years I'd expect to still find bacteria or something analogous in that pond. Ignore the fact that location on the Earth loses meaning at that time scale due to plate tectonics. I'd expect to find bacteria AND lots of other forms of life all over the place everywhere I looked. This demonstrates another misunderstanding ID people have with evolution. Bacteria and humans are equally evolved. We've all been evolving for the same amount of time. Bacteria are just as old as humans, all contemporary species are. No extant species is "less evolved" than any other. You can say they are "more primitive" but what does that really mean? Compared to what?
Anthropocentrism is a vice biologists are broken of early on. Religious people often find the idea that humans aren't special, that the world wasn't made just for us, positively abhorrent. Strangely these same religions often preach humility. What a contradiction.
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