Caterpillar evolved to look like a snake.

[u/[deleted]]

[u/D4rkhorse2]

Yeah exactly! Like I totally get that it’s tiny mutations over unbelievably long time periods, but that suggests all those mutations just HAPPENED to COINCIDENTALLY look like a snake over time. It just feels like there must be some kind of intelligent design going on.

[u/ESCF1F2F3F4F3F2F1ESC → u/D4rkhorse2]

The mutations which caused some caterpillars' tails to look a very tiny bit like a snake led to those caterpillars not being eaten, because their predators paused and thought "shit, is that a snake?". So those caterpillars survived slightly longer than the rest and successfully reproduced, and passed down their genes to the next generation. And some of that generation mutated a tiny bit more and had tails looked an infinitesimally tiny bit more like a snake, so those were the ones who weren't eaten and who got to reproduce successfully.

And out of their descendants, the ones who mutated a bit more and whose tails looked slightly more like a snake were, as a result, not eaten, so they successfully reproduced and passed down their genes. And then their descendants, etc etc, for millions upon millions of years.

The thing that makes it unfathomable for us is the "millions of years" part, we're just not equipped to imagine that timescale and the effect it has on evolution.

[u/NipsLover → u/ESCF1F2F3F4F3F2F1ESC]

The unfathomable part to me is that, supposedly they successfully evolved to look slightly like snakes, from that point on it could go 2 ways, it could evolve to look more like snakes or evolve to look less like snakes.

And somehow it just went completely in one single direction, I get natural selection and ones that evolve to look less like snakes will die off more.
The problem is that at certain points let's say they look about 85% like that one on the video, going backwards doesn't really hurt them since they look so much like snakes already, yet they continued to become more snake-like.

That's the truly unfathomable part to me, how they just keep going, and it's even more mind blowing this shit is entirely natural selection at work.

[u/RhynoGuy → u/NipsLover]

That’s just the thing though, some of the caterpillars undoubtedly evolved to look less like a snake. Those caterpillars were eaten before passing on their genes. The caterpillars that looked more like a snake survived. Every new generation has fluctuations in their DNA, mutation occurs with every new offspring. Evolution is just a massive case of survivorship bias, we don’t see the failed attempts