CRICKET CONVERGENTLY EVOLVES, as reported BBC
News, ScienceDaily and Nature News 29 May 2014 and Current Biology doi:
10.1016/j.cub.2014.04.053. Male crickets attract mates with a chirping sound
made by scraping their wings together. The sound is produced when a series of
grooves and ridges on their wings rub over one another. Unfortunately for
crickets in Hawaii the sound also attracts deadly parasitic flies. In 2003
scientists found that male crickets on the island of
Kauai had flat wings that would not produce any sound, thus making it harder for
flies to find them. The scientists estimated that 95% of Kauai male crickets
were chirpless, but were still able to find a mate by remaining close to any
remaining noisy males. Scientists have now also found silent crickets with flat
wings on another Hawaiian island, Oahu. The two islands are too far apart for
the crickets to have flown there by themselves, but did the insects hitchhike on
boats and planes? However, gene studies have shown the flat wings have been
produced by different mutations so the flat wings do not have a common chirpless
ancestor. The scientists who carried out the study claim this is an example of
“rapid convergent evolution” where two different mutations occurred
independently but produced the same result. They write in their report:
“Divergent wing morphologies linked to different loci thus cause identical
behavioural outcomes—silence—illustrating the power of selection to rapidly
shape convergent adaptations from distinct genomic starting points”. Nathan
Bailey of St Andrews University commented: “There is more than one way to
silence a cricket. Evolution by natural selection has produced similar
adaptations from different genetic starting points in what appears to be the
blink of an eye in evolutionary time”. He also told BBC News, “This is an
exciting opportunity to detect genomic evolution in real time in a wild system,
which has usually been quite a challenge, owing to the long timescales over
which evolution acts”.
Links: BBC, Nature
News, ScienceDaily
ED. COM. The change
from noisy grooved wings to silent flat wings is a change brought about by a
degenerate mutation, and propagated by natural selection, but it is not
evolution, convergent or otherwise. The flat wings have a selective advantage
ONLY in the presence of parasitic flies and ONLY as long as there are
some remaining CHIRPING crickets with normal wings. When either the flies or the
chirping crickets disappear, so will the chirpless ones because they won’t be
able to attract mates. The fact that there is more than one way to silence a
cricket, merely proves there is more than one way for genes to degenerate, and
is a good reminder of what mutations really do – they destroy genetic
information. In this case they have destroyed the information for grooved wings.
Here we see how the processes that supposedly drive evolution are really
degenerative processes that eventually destroy living things. The real history
of the world is from created perfection to degeneration, change yes, evolution
NO! Finally, the term convergent evolution is often used to explain why
creatures that live in similar environments have similar features, but this does
not explain how they got these features. (Ref. insects, ecology, mutations,
selection) Creation Research.
