Butterfly wings have no pigment, but rely on light interference through their microscopic crystalline scales to produce the color. For thousands of years people tried in vain to harvest the color pigment from butterflies. Turns out no such color pigment exists. Butterfly wings appear colored because they manipulate light using millions of microscopic crystals.
If a bluegreen dot on the wing is surrounded by a black border, the microcrystals in the dot are tuned with just the crystal spacing needed to amplify the bluegreen light, while minimizing all other wavelengths. The surrounding black scales have crystal spacings that are tuned to cancel out ALL colors, hence making no light=black. One such scale structure is shown below, though there are - of course - many different 3D geometries used by various butterfly species. Some of these 3D butterfly wing crystalline formations are so complex as to so far be too difficult for any geometrist-physicist to analyze. In some species the crystalline wing cells look like Christmas trees.
from https://imgur.com/7HdO14o
micrograph of a butterfly wing scale
from http://delusions0fgrandeur.blogspot.com/2012/03/on-wings-of-butterfly.html
showing light entering and leaving the wing crystals
Below shows a schematic for how red light will be lost, while blue light will be magnified and bounced back to the viewer.
from https://www.scienceabc.com/nature/why-is-blue-difficult-to-find-in-nature.html
If you do not understand the constructive and destructive interference of light, do not feel bad, no shame, it is difficult to explain simply. Think prisms artfully arranged to let through only blue light, or only red light. Or think soap bubbles where you see all the colors of the rainbow - that is happening because of the interference of light. Some butterfly wing geometries are tuned to return only two specific wavelengths, such as a red and a blue, hence giving purple, which is called a "non-spectral color", meaning a color that is not part of the rainbow but only exists as a blend of wavelengths.
I learned today a little more about how those crystalline ridges are formed. Each "Christmas tree" crystal starts as one cell, which divides into two cells. One daughter cell stays below as an anchor. The other daughter cell loses its organelles, then loses its water, shrivels up, then hardens into a crystalline form. This crystalline form is what refracts back a color. Each cell on each part of the wing hardens into a different crystalline form. All together these different crystalline hardenings make all the different colors on the butterfly wing. I just described several steps. How any of these steps happens is not known.
All this blows my mind.
I assume it also blows the mind of most of the people studying this firsthand. I learned about it from someone writing a review of research, and she was much less impressed. She used all this as a starting point for proving Darwinian evolution. Her initial arguments were the usual unproven proofs, but her punchline is what really caught my attention. By "unproven proofs" I mean she said "clearly all this microscopic 3D crystalline geometry was a brilliant solution by evolution to attract mates and avoid being eaten." She offered no evidence for this, but triumphantly stated that "since the butterflies can attract mates and avoid being eaten, then this proves yet again the superiority of Darwinian evolution over any other theories." I am so accustomed to this typical sloppy reasoning from modern-schooled Biologists that I was skimming through quickly, looking for some nuggets, practicing my deep breathing exercises to keep relaxed and minimize internal screaming.
The nugget came in her report of a man named Bates, who wrote to Charles Darwin concerning his (Bates) observations of how quickly butterflies can change their coloring. He found several species of butterflies which can, in 4 generations, completely change their coloration pattern to closely match the color patterns of other species. He found that these "mimicking" species could find themselves surrounded by a different butterfly species with totally different coloration, and in a few generations their color patterns changed to match the pattern of the new group. Bates wrote to Darwin of these facts in favor of Darwin's theory, because it showed that species are not immutable. Remember, this was one of the most controversial aspects of Darwin's theory - that new life forms could arise.
As proof of new forms arising, Bates is correct, it does show that species can change. I did not read Bates' original letters, so I do not know if he argued any more than this. But the writer I was reading used this truly astonishing fact to claim, yet again, that Darwin was right, end of story.
Huh?
I take the astonishing fact of butterfly wing color pattern change and conclude exactly the opposite.
Where are the random variations required by Darwinian theory? Where are the millions of years of mindless small variations that are statistically weighted in their ability to attract mates and avoid being eaten? They are nowhere. Instead we go from this
to this
in one year, that is four generations.
Such a change is something that our best human material-science-engineer-chemists cannot do. A good artist could do it. That says something about what is needed to make the change.
Someone who believes in Darwinian evolution must say this is change of color pattern is caused by random fluctuations in the butterfly DNA. Yet random DNA changes take 10,000 generations to accumulate. Here we see only 4 generations. And there is no known connection between butterfly DNA and butterfly wing color patterns. How can the new pattern be achieved? Where are the thousands of mindless variations which must be sorted through by thousands of generations of offspring being eaten or spared?
Thank you Mr Bates. You traveled to dangerous lands, and risked your material welfare. You made careful observations, and wrote to one of your heroes. You are an inspiration.
How the butterfly wing color pattern can arise requires a very different model than the one Darwin proposed. I have written much, and lectured in public much about this different model, so I will not go into that here.
post note,
I know that the contemporary-trained Biologist will say that "millions of years evolution has selected for a species of butterfly that has this ability to mimic other butterfly species", hence "this only proves that Darwin was right." Deep breath. Relax.
post post note,
I am not anti-Darwin. He is one of my heroes. He has humility and genius. But humility and genius do not apply to most people who believe wholesale in Darwin's theories. Read your Stephen Jay Gould. Read how in the 1970's all of Darwin's original theory was abandoned by the world's top evolutionary biologists. Read what was proposed instead.
Darwin's humility and genius were spot-on about several things
1) Living creatures change over time
2) All life is related, connected, and comes out of previous life forms
3) In many cases what is ill-fitted to survive is weeded out
But Darwin's original ideas have unambiguously failed on the question of how new forms arise. How do new forms arise? Form follows function - but how exactly do the new forms arise? Random variation has always been shown to be statistically irrelevant. In this short essay I cannot summarize the research. Look it up.
post post post note,
Contemporary Biology cannot explain form. Even though one of the maxims of contemporary Biology is "form follows function",
no existing Biological theories explain or predict form.
What exactly in our DNA causes us to have 10 fingers and not otherwise? What exactly in the DNA of a bird causes the outer wing feathers to be longer than the inner, and not otherwise? What exactly in the DNA of a bacteria causes the flagella motor to be in a rotary engine form with its 64 moving parts and on/off switched to be placed as they are and not otherwise? What in the DNA causes the form of the the human digestive tract to differ from the cow's? What exactly in the DNA creates these forms? There is no answer. I will be so bold as to propose that there is not a single form/shape/structure that can be predicted from the DNA paradigm of biology. Yet we are so famously instructed that DNA theory is the Central Dogma of all Biology.
I grow weary of these basic contradictions.
Oh yes, the existing DNA paradigm can explain how to destroy form. Many DNA mutations can be shown to destroy a form that was supposed to arise. But is your intellect really so lazy as to believe that this shows that the DNA can predict the form in the first place?
This is AMAZING! I’m so grateful to have discovered you. I’ve watched your presentation/discussion (Light of Life) with Matthew Ehret three times -- two by myself, once with my husband. I passed it along to our 21 yr old son who is a senior studying engineering physics at University of St Thomas. He comes home on the weekends and watched it here and thought it fascinating. Incidentally, his favorite physics professor at UST is also Dr. Clarage!