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."

Re:Ah, yes!

[Black Parrot]

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.

Re:Is it evolution, or survival of the fittest?

[camperdave]

did the specific roaches which HAD the sugar aversion trait simply avoid being poisoned and passed along said aversion to their offspring?

But that *is* evolution. Gen N had a mix of glucose aversion and non. All the non died and were selected out, so Gen N+1 have the glucose aversion.

Re:Selective breeding, not evolution

[janimal]

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 [wikipedia.org] according to the definition in wikipedia.

Re:Using cockroaches

[femtobyte]

This approach might not work out so well with r-strategy breeders [wikipedia.org] --- you'll fill the house up for sure with happy little roaches, but they won't be leaving the neighbors' homes to get there (just exponentially exploding their population to catch up with the expanded resources). Setting up "guard rows" of tasty pesticide-free crops to lure pests away from agricultural fields works to the extent that said pests are highly mobile and individually "exploring" a wide enough area to "find" the guard rows in preference to the main crops. However, roaches tend to locate and nest in one area (with only "excess population" expanding out into new territory) --- some very lucky bugs will find the new house (and start breeding to fill it), but the roaches behind your kitchen cabinets will stay behind to raise their kids behind your kitchen cabinets.

Re:Ah, yes!

[JoshuaZ]

So, most of the other responses here meet most of the major relevant issues. But one thing that's curious is that while some young earth creationists clam they accept "microevolution" what they mean by this is quite hard to pin down. One common claim is that by microevolution one means evolution below the species level. But Answers in Genesis, the world's largest YEC ministry lists claiming that speciation does not occur as an argument that creationists should not use because the evidence for speciation is so strong. http://www.answersingenesis.org/get-answers/topic/arguments-we-dont-use [answersingenesis.org]. Now, here's the really neat bit: A variety of ID proponents argue that speciation doesn't happen. There's an interview in Expelled where one of the ID proponents says that speciation doesn't happen. This isn't the only example. So it looks like the ID proponents are frequently even more reactionary than the most sophisticated YECs. That's what happens when you are constructing viewpoints to sound just plausible enough to have an appearance of controversy and not actually trying to figure out the truth.

Re:Ah, yes!

[JoshuaZ]

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 [wikipedia.org]. 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 [wikipedia.org]. 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) [wikipedia.org]. 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.

Re:Easy fix to this problem

[Solandri]

Most high fructose corn syrup is 42%-53% glucose [wikipedia.org].

Yes I know this contradicts the conventional wisdom that HFCS is bad, while sucrose (which your body breaks down into 50% fructose / 50% glucose) is good. But the people pushing that agenda aren't really the types who took chemistry in school. It's just called "high fructose" because it has a larger fraction of fructose than regular syrup, which is mostly glucose.

Re:Is it evolution, or survival of the fittest?

[LordLucless]

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.

Re: Is it evolution, or survival of the fittest?

[Smauler]

Ever notice how African-American males are often muscular, large boned with large lips, and African-American females tend to have wide hips (thought to be better for childbearing)? This was due to forced mating under American slavery, where (unfortunately) slaves were force-bred to reinforce traits desirable for both hard manual labor and for producing more slaves. Compare an "African-American" to recent immigrants from Africa. Note post-slavery immigrants by and large lack those traits.

You know... most western Africans share those traits too. It's not because of slavery. I'd like to see any study showing significant differences between african americans and the population they came from (which cannot be explained by interbreeding with white & indigenous people).

Re:It takes all the running you can do...

[dryeo]

Darwin stood on others shoulders, as do most all great thinkers and natural selection wasn't a new idea though Darwin did express it very well in his writings. One example is his grandfather Erasmus Darwin ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erasmus_Darwin [wikipedia.org] ) who amongst other things wrote "the strongest and most active animal should propagate the species, which should thence become improved" in Zoonomia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoonomia [wikipedia.org] ) and he based his ideas on earlier proto-evolutionists such as James Burnett, Lord Monboddo ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Burnett,_Lord_Monboddo [wikipedia.org] ).

Re:Ah, yes!

[jkflying]

Just a quick pointer, most evolution (in mammals at least) isn't through mutations, but through recombination. Just as an example, in humans, on average there is only one new mutation (ie. one corrupted base-pair) per two generations. When you consider the size of the genome is equivalent to 3.5GB of data, that is virtually nothing.

Then compare that to something like HIV, which only has a genome size of 1.2KB of data, but still averages about 1 to 2 mutations per generation.

Re:Ah, yes!

[hawkinspeter]

I like the way you're thinking there, but I have a counter-example for the whole Intelligent Squid Designer philosophy:

Cephalod gills don't use a counterflow arrangement (where blood and water move in opposite directions) which would provide a maximum concentration gradient. However, the much more efficient counterflow system is used all over the place (e.g. lungs, fish gills, kidneys, penguin feet) but not in cephalopods.

It's almost as if Cthulhu came up with a great design and then decided to give all his children the retard version of it. Maybe he just hates his kids.

Re:Ah, yes!

[hawkinspeter]

Richard Dawkins states the case quite clearly in The Blind Watchmaker:

My second example of an evolutionary progression that didn't happen because of disadvantageous intermediates, even though it might ultimately have turned out better if it had, concerns the retina of our eyes (and all other vertebrates). Like any nerve, the optic nerve is a trunk cable, a bundle of separate 'insulated' wires, in this case about three million of them. Each of the three million wires leads from one cell in the retina to the brain. You can think of them as the wires leading from a bank of three million photocells (actually three million relay stations gathering information from an even larger number of photocells) to the computer that is to process the information in the brain. They are gathered together from all over the retina into a single bundle, which is the optic nerve for that eye. Any engineer would naturally assume that the photocells would point towards the light, with their wires leading backwards towards the brain. He would laugh at any suggestion that the photocells might point away from the light, with their wires departing on the side nearest the light. Yet this is exactly what happens in all vertebrate retinas. Each photocell is, in effect, wired in backwards, with its wire sticking out on the side nearest the light. The wire has to travel over the surface of the retina, to a point where it dives through a hole in the retina (the so-called 'blind spot') to join the optic nerve. This means that the light, instead of being granted an unrestricted passage to the photocells, has to pass through a forest of connecting wires, presumably suffering at least some attenuation and distortion (actually probably not much but, still, it is the principle of the thing that would offend any tidy-minded engineer!).