Evolution has found (sometimes multiple times) the camera, general intelligence, nanotech, electronavigation, aerial endurance better than any drone, robots more flexible than any human-made drone, highly efficient photosynthesis, etc.
First of all let’s answer another question: why didn’t evolution evolve the wheel like the alien wheeled elephants in His Dark Materials?
Is it biologically impossible to evolve?
Well, technically, the flagella of various bacteria is a proper wheel.
No the likely answer is that wheels are great when you have roads and suck when you don’t. Roads are build by ants to some degree but on the whole probably don’t make sense for an animal-intelligence species.
Aren’t there animals that use projectiles?
Hold up. Is it actually true that there is not a single animal with a gun, harpoon or other projectile weapon?
Porcupines have quils, some snakes spit venom, a type of fish spits water as a projectile to kick insects of leaves than eats insects. Bombadier beetles can produce an explosive chemical mixture. Skunks use some other chemicals. Some snails shoot harpoons from very close range. There is a crustacean that can snap its claw so quickly it creates a shockwave stunning fish. Octopi use ink. Goliath birdeater spider shoot hair. Electric eels shoot electricity etc.
Maybe there isn’t an incentive gradient? The problem with this argument is that the same argument can be made for lots and lots of abilities that animals have developed, often multiple times. Flight, camera, a nervous system.
But flight has an intermediate form: glider monkeys, flying squirrels, flying fish.
Except, I think there are lots of intermediate forms for guns & harpoons too:
There are animals with quills. It’s only a small number of steps from having quils that you release when attack to actively shooting and aiming these quils. Why didn’t Evolution evolve Hydralisks? For many other examples—see the list above.
In a Galaxy far far away
I think it is plausible that the reason animals don’t have guns is simply an accident. Somewhere in the vast expanses of space circling a dim sun-like star the water-bearing planet Hiram Maxim is teeming with life. Nothing like an intelligent species has yet evolved yet it’s many lifeforms sport a wide variety of highly effective projectile weapons. Indeed, the majority of larger lifeforms have some form of projective weapon as a result of the evolutionary arms race. The savannahs sport gazelle-like herbivores evading sniper-gun equppied predators.
Some many parsecs away is the planet Big Bertha, a world is embroilled in permanent biological trench warfare. More than 95% percent of the biomass of animals larger than a mouse is taken up by members of just 4 geni of eusocial gun-equipped species or their domesticastes. Yet the individual intelligence of members of these species doesn’t exceed that of a cat.
The largest of the four geni builds massive dams like beavers, practices husbandry of various domesticated species, agriculture and engages in massive warfare against rival colonies using projectile harpoons that grow from their limbs. Yet all of this is biological, not technological: the behaviours and abilites are evolved rather than learned. There is not a single species whose intelligence rivals that of a Great ape, either individually or collectively.
Most uses of projected venom or other unpleasant substance seem to be defensive rather than offensive. One reason for this is that it’s expensive to make the dangerous substance, and throwing it away wastes it. This cost is affordable if it is used to save your own life, but not easily affordable to acquire a single meal. This life vs meal distinction plays into a lot of offense/defense strategy expenses.
For the hunting options, usually they are also useful for defense. The hunting options all seem cheaper to deploy: punching mantis shrimp, electric eel, fish spitting water...
My guess it that it’s mostly a question of whether the intermediate steps to the evolved behavior are themselves advantageous. Having a path of consistently advantageous steps makes it much easier for something to evolve. Having to go through a trough of worse-in-the-short-term makes things much less likely to evolve. A projectile fired weakly is a cost (energy to fire, energy to producing firing mechanism, energy to produce the projectile, energy to maintain the complexity of the whole system despite it not being useful yet). Where’s the payoff of a weakly fired projectile? Humans can jump that gap by intuiting that a faster projectile would be more effective. Evolution doesn’t get to extrapolate and plan like that.
Jellyfish have nematocysts, which is a spear on a rope, with poison on the tip. The spear has barbs, so when it goes in, it sticks. Then the jellyfish pulls in its prey. The spears are microscopic, but very abundant.
Yes, but I think snake fangs and jellyfish nematocysts are a slightly different type of weapon. Much more targeted application of venom. If the jellyfish squirted their venom as a cloud into the water around them when a fish came near, I expect it would not be nearly as effective per unit of venom.
As a case where both are present, the spitting cobra uses its fangs to inject venom into its prey. However, when threatened, it can instead (wastefully) spray out its venom towards the eyes of an attacker. (the venom has little effect on unbroken mammal skin, but can easily blind if it gets into their eyes).
Fair argument
I guess where I’m lost is that I feel I can make the same ‘no competitive intermediate forms’ for all kinds of wondrous biological forms and functions that have evolved, e.g. the nervous system.
Indeed, this kind of argument used to be a favorite for ID advocates.
There are lots of excellent applications for even very simple nervous systems. The simplest surviving nervous systems are those of jellyfish. They form a ring of coupled oscillators around the periphery of the organism. Their goal is to synchronize muscular contraction so the bell of the jellyfish contracts as one, to propel the jellyfish efficiently. If the muscles contracted independently, it wouldn’t be nearly as good.
Any organism with eyes will profit from having a nervous system to connect the eyes to the muscles. There’s a fungus with eyes and no nervous system, but as far as I know, every animal with eyes also has a nervous system. (The fungus in question is Pilobolus, which uses its eye to aim a gun. No kidding!)
My naive hypothesis: Once you’re able to launch a projectile at a predator or prey such that it breaks skin or shell, if you want it to die, its vastly cheaper to make venom at the ends of the projectiles than to make the projectiles launch fast enough that there’s a good increase in probability the adversary dies quickly.
My completely naive guess would be that venom is mostly too slow for creatures of this size compared with gross physical damage and blood loss, and that getting close enough to set claws on the target is the hard part anyway. Venom seems more useful as a defensive or retributive mechanism than a hunting one.
Another huge missed opportunity is thermal vision. Thermal infrared vision is a gigantic boon for hunting at night, and you might expect eg owls and hawks to use it to spot prey hundreds of meters away in pitch darkness, but no animals do (some have thermal sensing, but only extremely short range)
Snakes have thermal vision, using pits on their cheeks to form pinhole cameras. It pays to be cold-blooded when you’re looking for nice hot mice to eat.
If you are warm, any warm-detectors inside your body will detect mostly you. Imagine if blood vessels in your own eye radiated in visible spectrum with the same intensity as daylight environment.
It‘s possible to filter out a constant high value, but not possible to filter out a high level of noise. Unfortunately warmth = random vibration = noise. If you want a low noise thermal camera, you have to cool the detector, or only look for hot things, like engine flares. Fighter planes do both.
Animals do have guns. Humans are animals. Humans have guns. Evolution made us, we made guns, therefore guns indirectly exist because of evolution.
Or do you mean “why don’t animals have something like guns but permanently attached to them instead of regular guns?” There, I’d start with wondering why humans prefer to have our guns separate from our bodies, compared to affixing them permanently or semi-permanently to ourselves. All the drawbacks of choosing a permanently attached gun would also disadvantage a hypothetical creature that got the accessory through a longer, slower selection process.
Why don’t animals have guns?
Or why didn’t evolution evolve the Hydralisk?
Evolution has found (sometimes multiple times) the camera, general intelligence, nanotech, electronavigation, aerial endurance better than any drone, robots more flexible than any human-made drone, highly efficient photosynthesis, etc.
First of all let’s answer another question: why didn’t evolution evolve the wheel like the alien wheeled elephants in His Dark Materials?
Is it biologically impossible to evolve?
Well, technically, the flagella of various bacteria is a proper wheel.
No the likely answer is that wheels are great when you have roads and suck when you don’t. Roads are build by ants to some degree but on the whole probably don’t make sense for an animal-intelligence species.
Aren’t there animals that use projectiles?
Hold up. Is it actually true that there is not a single animal with a gun, harpoon or other projectile weapon?
Porcupines have quils, some snakes spit venom, a type of fish spits water as a projectile to kick insects of leaves than eats insects. Bombadier beetles can produce an explosive chemical mixture. Skunks use some other chemicals. Some snails shoot harpoons from very close range. There is a crustacean that can snap its claw so quickly it creates a shockwave stunning fish. Octopi use ink. Goliath birdeater spider shoot hair. Electric eels shoot electricity etc.
Maybe there isn’t an incentive gradient? The problem with this argument is that the same argument can be made for lots and lots of abilities that animals have developed, often multiple times. Flight, camera, a nervous system.
But flight has an intermediate form: glider monkeys, flying squirrels, flying fish.
Except, I think there are lots of intermediate forms for guns & harpoons too:
There are animals with quills. It’s only a small number of steps from having quils that you release when attack to actively shooting and aiming these quils. Why didn’t Evolution evolve Hydralisks? For many other examples—see the list above.
In a Galaxy far far away
I think it is plausible that the reason animals don’t have guns is simply an accident. Somewhere in the vast expanses of space circling a dim sun-like star the water-bearing planet Hiram Maxim is teeming with life. Nothing like an intelligent species has yet evolved yet it’s many lifeforms sport a wide variety of highly effective projectile weapons. Indeed, the majority of larger lifeforms have some form of projective weapon as a result of the evolutionary arms race. The savannahs sport gazelle-like herbivores evading sniper-gun equppied predators.
Some many parsecs away is the planet Big Bertha, a world is embroilled in permanent biological trench warfare. More than 95% percent of the biomass of animals larger than a mouse is taken up by members of just 4 geni of eusocial gun-equipped species or their domesticastes. Yet the individual intelligence of members of these species doesn’t exceed that of a cat.
The largest of the four geni builds massive dams like beavers, practices husbandry of various domesticated species, agriculture and engages in massive warfare against rival colonies using projectile harpoons that grow from their limbs. Yet all of this is biological, not technological: the behaviours and abilites are evolved rather than learned. There is not a single species whose intelligence rivals that of a Great ape, either individually or collectively.
Please develop this question as a documentary special, for lapsed-Starcraft player homeschooling dads everywhere.
Most uses of projected venom or other unpleasant substance seem to be defensive rather than offensive. One reason for this is that it’s expensive to make the dangerous substance, and throwing it away wastes it. This cost is affordable if it is used to save your own life, but not easily affordable to acquire a single meal. This life vs meal distinction plays into a lot of offense/defense strategy expenses.
For the hunting options, usually they are also useful for defense. The hunting options all seem cheaper to deploy: punching mantis shrimp, electric eel, fish spitting water...
My guess it that it’s mostly a question of whether the intermediate steps to the evolved behavior are themselves advantageous. Having a path of consistently advantageous steps makes it much easier for something to evolve. Having to go through a trough of worse-in-the-short-term makes things much less likely to evolve. A projectile fired weakly is a cost (energy to fire, energy to producing firing mechanism, energy to produce the projectile, energy to maintain the complexity of the whole system despite it not being useful yet). Where’s the payoff of a weakly fired projectile? Humans can jump that gap by intuiting that a faster projectile would be more effective. Evolution doesn’t get to extrapolate and plan like that.
Jellyfish have nematocysts, which is a spear on a rope, with poison on the tip. The spear has barbs, so when it goes in, it sticks. Then the jellyfish pulls in its prey. The spears are microscopic, but very abundant.
Yes, but I think snake fangs and jellyfish nematocysts are a slightly different type of weapon. Much more targeted application of venom. If the jellyfish squirted their venom as a cloud into the water around them when a fish came near, I expect it would not be nearly as effective per unit of venom. As a case where both are present, the spitting cobra uses its fangs to inject venom into its prey. However, when threatened, it can instead (wastefully) spray out its venom towards the eyes of an attacker. (the venom has little effect on unbroken mammal skin, but can easily blind if it gets into their eyes).
Fair argument I guess where I’m lost is that I feel I can make the same ‘no competitive intermediate forms’ for all kinds of wondrous biological forms and functions that have evolved, e.g. the nervous system. Indeed, this kind of argument used to be a favorite for ID advocates.
There are lots of excellent applications for even very simple nervous systems. The simplest surviving nervous systems are those of jellyfish. They form a ring of coupled oscillators around the periphery of the organism. Their goal is to synchronize muscular contraction so the bell of the jellyfish contracts as one, to propel the jellyfish efficiently. If the muscles contracted independently, it wouldn’t be nearly as good.
Any organism with eyes will profit from having a nervous system to connect the eyes to the muscles. There’s a fungus with eyes and no nervous system, but as far as I know, every animal with eyes also has a nervous system. (The fungus in question is Pilobolus, which uses its eye to aim a gun. No kidding!)
My naive hypothesis: Once you’re able to launch a projectile at a predator or prey such that it breaks skin or shell, if you want it to die, its vastly cheaper to make venom at the ends of the projectiles than to make the projectiles launch fast enough that there’s a good increase in probability the adversary dies quickly.
Why don’t lions, tigers, wolves, crocodiles, etc have venom-tipped claws and teeth?
(Actually, apparently many ancestral mammal species like did have venom spurs, similar to the male platypus)
My completely naive guess would be that venom is mostly too slow for creatures of this size compared with gross physical damage and blood loss, and that getting close enough to set claws on the target is the hard part anyway. Venom seems more useful as a defensive or retributive mechanism than a hunting one.
Another huge missed opportunity is thermal vision. Thermal infrared vision is a gigantic boon for hunting at night, and you might expect eg owls and hawks to use it to spot prey hundreds of meters away in pitch darkness, but no animals do (some have thermal sensing, but only extremely short range)
Snakes have thermal vision, using pits on their cheeks to form pinhole cameras. It pays to be cold-blooded when you’re looking for nice hot mice to eat.
Thermal vision for warm-blooded animals has obvious problems with noise.
Care to explain? Noise?
If you are warm, any warm-detectors inside your body will detect mostly you. Imagine if blood vessels in your own eye radiated in visible spectrum with the same intensity as daylight environment.
Can’t you filter that out? .
How do fighter planes do it?
It‘s possible to filter out a constant high value, but not possible to filter out a high level of noise. Unfortunately warmth = random vibration = noise. If you want a low noise thermal camera, you have to cool the detector, or only look for hot things, like engine flares. Fighter planes do both.
Woah great example didn’t know bout that. Thanks Tao
Animals do have guns. Humans are animals. Humans have guns. Evolution made us, we made guns, therefore guns indirectly exist because of evolution.
Or do you mean “why don’t animals have something like guns but permanently attached to them instead of regular guns?” There, I’d start with wondering why humans prefer to have our guns separate from our bodies, compared to affixing them permanently or semi-permanently to ourselves. All the drawbacks of choosing a permanently attached gun would also disadvantage a hypothetical creature that got the accessory through a longer, slower selection process.