"Go home, evolution, you are drunk"

I’ve been much too silent on the blogging front the last couple of weeks, as I was evaluating a big pile of grant applications – an activity that seems to have sucked all intelligent life out of my brain. I have a few ‘real’ blog posts in mind, but for now let me just direct your attention to an awesome tumblr, ‘WTF, Evolution?’ (which I came across via Hugo Mercier on Facebook). It posts pictures of very strange-looking animals, which by itself is already rather cool, but the best part are the comments. For example, for this animal

 

The comment is:

“So I was thinking.”

“Great, evolution.”

“Nobody really needs eyeballs and limbs and all that, right? When you get down to it, all you really need to be alive is an opening for stuff to go in and an opening for stuff to come out.”

“Well, yeah, I guess so.”

“I might try making things that way for a few million years. ‘Sea cucumbers’ and the like.”

“Okay, but it’s not just going to be, like, a tube with a mouth and an anus, is it? That sounds a little crass.”

“What if I made it pink?”

“I don’t know…”

“Oh, and also, it’s going to breathe through the butt end.”

On a more serious note, one might be tempted to see some of these creatures as illustrations of the fact that evolution really is about 'just-good-enough' rather than 100% optimization of function. Or one might argue that there must be a great adaptive story behind each of these extravagant shapes, given that aesthetics is not exactly a crucial evolutionary desideratum (as pointed out by Hugo on FB). Either way, do check it out, if nothing else for a good dose of fun on this Thursday morning.