There is a story, possibly apocryphal, of the distinguished British biologist,
J.B.S. Haldane, who found himself in the company of a group of theologians. On
being asked what one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a
study of his creation, Haldane is said to have answered, “An inordinate
fondness for beetles.”
Haldane's friend Kenneth Kermack, who says the quote is real, said on the matter:
>Haldane was making a theological point: God is most likely to take trouble over reproducing his own image, and his 400,000 attempts at the perfect beetle contrast with his slipshod creation of man. When we meet the Almighty face to face he will resemble a beetle (or a star) and not Dr. Carey [the archbishop of Canterbury].
Beetles are like the MVP of species (minimum viable, not most valuable). Some superstructure (which can often double as armor) plus food storage. Even crabs are extravagant next to a beetle: crab takes that recipe and adds on attack capabilities, which are sometimes wasteful (crabs attacking humans are wasting their time for example).
Life: beetles, plus extra features which must be justified.
There are tons of other insect groups that could be very easily described as similarly "minimum viable" that don't have nearly the diversity. Abundance of some group doesn't necessarily correlate with the speciation within that group. Ants are an exceptionally successful type of insect with orders of magnitude fewer described species.
I’d like to suggest the swap of oyster in the place of clam, because oysters are less mobile than clams.
This leads to a funny observation: for some reason I think a worm and an oyster are obviously animals, like if you were a caveman with no notion of genetics or the tree of life and you came across either, I suspect you’d think “this thing is obviously some kind of animal.” But a sponge is not so obvious, I think, to our hypothetical caveman. I could believe a sponge is a weird plant.
I think you need at least one distinguishing feature beyond the minimal to become obviously an animal, for some reason.
Compared to the mammal template, beetles don’t have to do satisfy as many requirements (no temperature regulation, simple brains, etc). So they can have complicated biochemical attacks because they have a solid foundation, easy to build on.
It is definitely possible I haven’t thought this out very well.
> Beetles are like the MVP of species (minimum viable, not most valuable).
Dude... There are water beetles that live underwater, but do also fly and walk. This is not "mininum viable" in any sense of the term. Just because they have smaller brains and less developed immune systems does not mean that they are millions of years beyond mammals in fantastic specialization!
Lots of beetles, but almost certainly even more wasps! Parasitoid wasps attack pretty much every known insect species, even other parasitoid wasps. If there's not a known parasitoid for a given insect species, you usually just haven't looked hard enough. Given that parasitoids tend to be specialists, attacking one or only a few other species, the math works out to there being more parasitoids than anything else around. Great paper on the topic here: https://bmcecol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12898-01...
Note: The article shares a common misconception about beetle anatomy, that the thorax is short and only has one pair of legs. Like all other insects, beetles thoraxes have three pairs of legs. It's just that their abdomen is shorter than it appears.
iirc in one of his videos (maybe that one) he also spends a lot of time discussing how because of their elytra they can have flight, without the downside of always-vulnerable wings like most (all?) other flying animals. I was surprised the article didn't go into more detail on that point.
I think it's interesting as there is a common beetle ancestor.
Usually, when we find something like this, the answer is because "taxonomy is more art than science". Like trees or fish. Both exist all over their respective branches of the evolutionary tree. You have fish species that do not have a common ancestor that does not also include "not fish".
Same with trees. Two "trees" can exist in groups with "not trees"
Although, I guess the picture could also be incomplete. It could just be showing the beetle lineage and not anything else that may branch from those branches.
In which case, this could be another case of cancerification. As much as nature loves a crab, it loves to start from a beetle.
Armchair evolutionist suggestion: because there must be something in the code that makes them better than other species at being picky mating? Or particularly susceptible for breaking compatibility in terms of successful mating?
I think this is much closer than the "they're a very good blank slate". There are plenty of exceptionally successful groups of organisms with far less diversity. The point is not how successful beetles are, it's how differentiated they are. Something about their ability to occupy niches that promote isolation and therefore speciation has to be involved.
The article mentioned that they diversified early due to the diversification of the first flowering plants, so re-radiating into each others' niches over the following hundred million years could certainly help that while keeping species distinct.
> The point is not how successful beetles are, it's how differentiated they are. Something about their ability to occupy niches that promote isolation and therefore speciation
It's also how differentiated (and isolated) the habitats themselves became over 100s of millions of years of climate change and plate tectonics.
There was a God of Evolution on Mono Island, where the biology quickly adapted to the wizardly visitors. Ponder Stibbons was especially impressed by the methodical logic, until he realized the god's main obsession was cockroaches, all "higher" life was incidental.
* No head, when screwed on to a body, ought to make sound like a cork being pushed into a bottle, but the beetle’s did in the hands of the god.
* And in that moment he knew that, despite the apparent beetle fixation, here was where he’d always wanted to be, at the cutting edge of the envelope in the fast lane of the state of the art.
I will add a new reason. They are pleasant to study.
They are small, hard and easy to manipulate and keep dry. A big collection fits in any room and they have an entertaining endless diversity of forms and colours, so primates like to collect them.
Don't believe me? How many roundworm or fly species do we know? How many we don't know still?
Readit News
>Haldane was making a theological point: God is most likely to take trouble over reproducing his own image, and his 400,000 attempts at the perfect beetle contrast with his slipshod creation of man. When we meet the Almighty face to face he will resemble a beetle (or a star) and not Dr. Carey [the archbishop of Canterbury].
Life: beetles, plus extra features which must be justified.
I’d like to suggest the swap of oyster in the place of clam, because oysters are less mobile than clams.
This leads to a funny observation: for some reason I think a worm and an oyster are obviously animals, like if you were a caveman with no notion of genetics or the tree of life and you came across either, I suspect you’d think “this thing is obviously some kind of animal.” But a sponge is not so obvious, I think, to our hypothetical caveman. I could believe a sponge is a weird plant.
I think you need at least one distinguishing feature beyond the minimal to become obviously an animal, for some reason.
I never read the opinion that beetles were simple in the "MVP" sense of the word. I think they can be quite complex life forms.
It is definitely possible I haven’t thought this out very well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_beetle
Maybe they enjoy it.
I would think the opposite; scorned humans often turn even more violent.
Dude... There are water beetles that live underwater, but do also fly and walk. This is not "mininum viable" in any sense of the term. Just because they have smaller brains and less developed immune systems does not mean that they are millions of years beyond mammals in fantastic specialization!
See this video from Clint's Reptiles for the explanation: https://youtu.be/-aV78eNbdTU?si=DCe3ZUx8C6IKlXJe&t=978
Usually, when we find something like this, the answer is because "taxonomy is more art than science". Like trees or fish. Both exist all over their respective branches of the evolutionary tree. You have fish species that do not have a common ancestor that does not also include "not fish".
Same with trees. Two "trees" can exist in groups with "not trees"
Although, I guess the picture could also be incomplete. It could just be showing the beetle lineage and not anything else that may branch from those branches.
In which case, this could be another case of cancerification. As much as nature loves a crab, it loves to start from a beetle.
It's also how differentiated (and isolated) the habitats themselves became over 100s of millions of years of climate change and plate tectonics.
I suppose that helps with species longevity.
* And in that moment he knew that, despite the apparent beetle fixation, here was where he’d always wanted to be, at the cutting edge of the envelope in the fast lane of the state of the art.
They are small, hard and easy to manipulate and keep dry. A big collection fits in any room and they have an entertaining endless diversity of forms and colours, so primates like to collect them.
Don't believe me? How many roundworm or fly species do we know? How many we don't know still?