Poisonous giant rat makes for hairy predator
“What is quite clear in this animal is that it is hardwired to find the poison, it is hardwired to chew it and it is hardwired to apply it to the small area of hairs,” Kingdon said. The animals apply the poisonous spit only to the specialized hairs on a small strip along its back. When threatened, the rat arches its back and uses specially adapted muscles to slick back its hair and expose the strip of poison.
“Hardwired,” he said.
A distant ancestor of these rats happened to evolve an immunity to this tree’s poison. Then one of its descendants happened to evolve a compulsion to eat the bark of the arrow-poison plant. Then a later descendant happened to evolve special hairs on its back that can store the poison.
“There is no other hair that is known to science that is remotely structured like these hairs,” Kingdon said.
Well, that explains the “Evolutionary marvel” section heading. Evolution is bound to produce all kinds of fully formed, functional, and completely novel features with nothing remotely similar in other closely-related species. Isn’t evolution clever!?
What is quite clear in this story is that evolution by random mutation and natural selection (and genetic drift, gene flow, and whatever other supposedly purposeless processes one might choose to add) is the least likely mechanism for the development of remarkable features like this one.
Listen, kids. X-Men is fantasy. It is not even science fiction, let alone science. Even if a mutation might rarely allow an organism to survive longer than its peers in very specific and abnormal circumstances, mutations are almost always immediately debilitating and always make an organism generally less fit. Accumulated mutations kill.
The symbiotic relationship between the African crested rat and the arrow-poison plant was designed. Engineered. Hardwired. It exists because someone wanted it to exist, and not because it just “happened.”