In Sub-Saharan Africa, an astonishing creature tries to evade notice. Its value for explaining evolution gave it away.
, a prominent British entomologist, in 1906. Kenya’s capital won his praise not for the famed animal migrations of the nearby Serengeti ecosystem, but for a phenomenon much subtler, though no less magnificent., or, as he sometimes called it, “the most interesting butterfly in the world.” At the time, he couldn’t have known just how interesting it would prove, as generations of biologists after him employed the species in their quest to solve the mysteries Darwin left behind.
By that point, it already had a reputation for furnishing discoveries and settling scientific disputes. In the early years of evolutionary theory, bickering biologists placedat the center of their quarrels over how evolution proceeds — fast or slow. Darwin conceived of evolution as a gradual process, built upon countless “micromutations.
. And if evolution can’t clear even that first hurdle, a dozen more fine-tunings are certainly out of the question.would reveal the truth. They recognized mimicry as the most instructive form of natural selection and this butterfly as the exemplar of mimicry. It only remained for two University of Liverpool geneticists, C. A. Clarke and P. M. Sheppard, to perform the necessary breeding experiments.
In this way, their work forged a synthesis. Both the gradualists and the saltationists had a point, after all — evolution can’t be reduced to a binary. That’s how most biologists envision the process these days, according to Krushnamegh Kunte, a researcher
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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