So you knew the answer already, then?
Naturally. I enjoy showing off.
I know as much as anyone.
The only way this would be a justifiable claim to make at all is to add the qualifier "... around here" to the end of this sentence.
Oh, this question.
It isn't, unless the female dung beetle, or one of the males which would have successfully mated with her had a dangerous recessive gene.
Otherwise the situation can be summed up, appropriately, with the aphorism. "Shit happens."
Next question.
Not quite. Shit does, indeed, happen. I asked you
why.
This kind of shit is theoretically explainable if you approach evolutionary theory from a slightly different direction.
James R asked if I "already knew the answer". My answer to that is no (disregarding my somewhat tongue in cheek response to him above).
I do, however, know of a theory which is receiving widespread attention among those interested in evolutionary theory, and has provided a paradigm for the study of it.
Most people will tend to approach Darwin's theory with an incomplete understanding of the dynamics.
For example, as I used to have when very young, with some vague romantic idea (admitted or not) that "Mother Nature" somehow had a hand in the proceedings, making conscious decisions on what was beneficial and what was not.
Later, I began to see things differently, began to understand the accidental nature of evolution and shifted my thinking towards what was beneficial to the species and what was not. Even then, as the anti-Darwinists often point out, there are anomalies in this line of thinking that aren't easily explained. Or, as Ophiolite has described above, dismissed as "accidents" of an otherwise successful propagation method. Not that I'm going to dismiss that answer entirely, because there
are often accidents of this nature which are just that - accidents.
How is it beneficial to the species if a female dung beetle is drowned in shit during an intensive mating competition?
Or, for a probably more cogent example :
How is it beneficial to the praying mantis to have the female eat the male during copulation?
The short answer, on the surface, is that it isn't. Surely a female insect could find other sources of food, thereby leaving the male to copulate with another female and potentially produce more offspring. Other species do that. Right? So why is a praying mantis a relatively successful species?
The answer is to look at evolution from the viewpoint of a gene, not the species. A gene doesn't have it's own brain. It is not a thinking, conscious, organism. It has one purpose only - to propagate itself via any means possible.
The male praying mantis, above, could have evolved to disengage from the female when she got
that look in her eye, and scarper before she did anything about it. Much like human males do when faced with the prospect of marriage before they're ready. Whether or not the consequences for the mantis are any more extreme than for the human male is a matter of debate, and... off topic. My pardons.
The male Praying Mantis, however, continues to inseminate the female even
while being eaten.
What does he gain from this?
It's fairly simple, really. The female receives
his sperm, and
only his sperm. The species be damned, they have nothing to do with it. Swans and humans have
nothing on the male praying mantis when it comes to monogamy. This guy dies for his children. Literally. He fertilises the female, and makes sure she has enough nutrients to feed them during gestation.
The most important thing about all of this is that
no other male gets a shot at her. She gets pregnant, goes torpid, and bears his children.
It's all him.
It's a similar thing with the dung beetles. Those males, uncaring about the female, uncaring about their species, uncaring about everything but this :
It will be either his sperm in her, or none.
Human males are often witnessed displaying somewhat similar behaviour, are they not?
This has nothing to do with the survival of the species. It has nothing to do with advantageous reproduction methods.
It is a display of extreme selfishness - and it works.
See, Darwin was a great man. A fantastic scientist, a man with an idea, inspiration, and a theory which led to a whole new understanding of nature.
But to consider the "Origin of the Species" the definitive work on the theory is to commit a grave error. Rather like discarding Galileo because Copernicus had all the answers.
But neither should it open the door to discarding Copernicus because Galileo refined and completed his work.
Darwin opened the doors, paved the way for a new era in science. But his theory was, and still is, only the beginning of understanding. And, like Copernicus, there are new names which will begin to make clear in the future what was only dimly understood to begin with.
One of those names is Richard Dawkins.
Check him out, Ophiolite. You might pick something up.
And I apologise in advance to anyone who actually does make the effort to read up on this - I've simplified things deliberately both due to the fact that I have no time to explain it fully, because my understanding of it is fresh and I'm only just beginning to see the possilbities, and because... well, damned if I'm going to write a book which has already been written. It's not something easily explained in a forum post.
A much more cogent explanation has already been presented, in Dawkin's "The Selfish Gene". I can not recommend it highly enough to anyone interested in the subject, and desirous of a fresh outlook to clear up those little "anomalies" we often have laid out as proof of Darwin's erroneous thinking.
There ya go, James. Y'all happy laddie now aye?
Or am I still unwelcome in your domain?
Damned if I don't sound like a windy advertisement.