Dung Beetles Navigate via the Milky Way
voices.nationalgeographic.org
voices.nationalgeographic.org
Now it's revealed that dung beetles can perceive the galaxy. Coincidence? I think not.
Obviously dung beetles are descended from a race of astronavigators who taught the Egyptians everything. They are the ancient astronauts. [Cue theremin music]
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
>If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a common semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
I have read the guidelines. Really.
Are you that afraid of God?
Honestly though, the more you break apart and put together the world through science, the stronger are the signs of a higher order.
The more you take comfort in shallow explanations, the dimmer and darker your world becomes.
Machine learning! Hah! It is nothing more than pattern recognition. Reactions to that pattern are a different thing entirely.
The more you break apart the world through science, the more you realize that even the simplest of rulesets can give rise to an incredibly complex network of of structure, behavior, and incentives — no deity required.
Enjoy your ever-shrinking God of the Gaps.
An incredibly complex network of structures is more proof of a higher order.
Enjoy your belief in a perpetually self-correcting field of science and a perception of the world that never ceases to change. By definition, you'll never find peace.
Yes there is, it's perfectly natural as was just explained to you above. No magic required, simple evolution.
> An incredibly complex network of structures is more proof of a higher order.
No, it isn't. It's well established that very simple rules can create incredibly complex network of structures with no higher order whatsoever.
> Enjoy your belief in a perpetually self-correcting field of science and a perception of the world that never ceases to change. By definition, you'll never find peace.
Nonsense. If you require iron age superstition to achieve peace, that's you; others don't have that requirement.
Not natural does not imply magic. Nature by my reasoning is magical though. Simple rules fail in the subject of the Heisenberg principle.
I don't need to, you either understand evolution or you don't; it's not an opinion to be argued, it is how the world works. There's nothing you can refute, any refutation is simply evidence you do not understand the facts of reality. You can't argue with someone who denies evolution, their mind doesn't value facts.
> Nature by my reasoning is magical though.
Then your reasoning is flawed. Magic is that which breaks the rules of nature, like your god for example. Nature is not magical, the natural world is the very definition of not magic.
> Simple rules fail in the subject of the Heisenberg principle.
You don't understand evolution, you're nowhere near ready to approach the topic of quantum mechanics.
No, reason and logic don't get old or stale, and they prevent me from thinking how I "see things" has anything to do with reality. Nature is what it is, it doesn't care about your beliefs and fears and need for an afterlife. Never mind the humor in the one with an imaginary friend he's trying to push on others calling others arrogant and ignorant, lol, don't project your flaws on me. People are here talking about a dung beetle story and you're prothletising, it's disgusting; keep that shit to yourself.
After all you have zero evidence what you believe is more true than the flying spaghetti monster, Thor, or any other past religion real or imagined. Thus logically any of your beliefs are vastly more likely to be false than true and are thus safely ignored.
CPU designers on the other hand really do need to pay attention as it's a significant real world issue for them. Past that, Quantium computing actually uses the Heisenberg principle while producing very consistent results.
People who are talking about science and don't want to bring God in the mix generally don't want to do so because they believe gods are silly superstition; you cant' be afraid of things you don't have any reason to believe exist.
> Honestly though, the more you break apart and put together the world through science, the stronger are the signs of a higher order.
Not remotely true.
Some people also avoid stepping on excrement, and that doesn't mean they are afraid of it.
A dung beetle goes into a bar. He doesn't order a drink. He just takes a stool.
It's not, at all. It's just become hard to see in the last 100 years or so of massive light pollution.
I don't have my photos on hand, but it really looks like this to the naked eye, maybe even more vibrant:
http://www.darksky.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/CC_MilkyWa...
(Be careful, at the CC we accidentally were "those guys"- there were no lights at all except red headlamps, and our car kept lighting up like a Christmas tree)
To show that the beetles were focusing on the Milky Way, the team moved the table into the Johannesburg Planetarium, and found that the beetles could orient equally well under a full starlit sky as when only the Milky Way was present.
If you are somewhere dark, the milky way is very easy to see . . . possibly the most obvious feature in the sky. It is just that light pollution makes it difficult to see from human-inhabited areas: a point which is actually raised in the article as a potential concern for animals that navigate by the night sky.
And I assume these beetles do just fine in light-polluted areas.
I really think it does . . . in a planetarium, you can turn on or off whatever you want. In my experience, the milky way switch includes the background glow and not the bright foreground stars which are rendered separately. In these situations, I tend to give the researchers the benefit of the doubt; they generally aren't dumb people.
And I assume these beetles do just fine in light-polluted areas.
I make no such assumption, but even if true, it means that they are using other points of reference (like street lamps) in addition to or instead of the milky way when it is not available. That does not render the conclusion that they use the milky way as one of their references incorrect. Also, we do know that light pollution is a serious problem for some species. If there are bright lights above a beach, hatchling sea turtles will go the wrong way, heading inland instead of out to sea. Apparently, they evolved to head toward the relative brightness of the moon reflecting off the sea.
The article also addresses the question of light pollution.
Where does it say that in the article?
"The tiny insects can orient themselves to the bright stripe of light generated by our galaxy"
It's really hard to find true darkness east of the Mississippi.
I never thought a dung beetle could sound so cute.