Ancient Egyptians considered dung beetles sacred, and believed that they were responsible for rejuvenating the sun during the night. Egyptians also had a keen spiritual and scientific interest in astronomy.<p>Now it's revealed that dung beetles can perceive the galaxy. Coincidence? I think not.<p>Obviously dung beetles are descended from a race of astronavigators who taught the Egyptians everything. <i>They are the ancient astronauts.</i> [Cue theremin music]
This is less surprising if you imagine evolution to be a reinforcement machine learning system. The dung beetle actors are given all the sensory inputs of their environment. Those that used the inputs (which happened to be our galaxy) where better at satisfying goal and thus had higher selection rate for next iteration of system. The actors, much like machine leaning, AI, don't have any logic nor any reasoning. They simply are a ludicrously complex, but deterministic state machine of inputs -> mess -> outputs. The mess being seeming unintelligible, not rational, with lots of "cruft".
I have found the link to the original paper: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2012.12.034" rel="nofollow">http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2012.12.034</a>
For context: TED talk where navigation via the sun is discussed and shown- <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/marcus_byrne_the_dance_of_the_dung_beetle" rel="nofollow">https://www.ted.com/talks/marcus_byrne_the_dance_of_the_dung...</a>
But how do they know it's not based on just a few bright stars? Milky way is pretty hard to see with our large human eyes. Insect eyes are good for panoramic views, but much less efficient at low light acuity.
Here's the tweet thread that brought this to the forefront today - <a href="https://twitter.com/GeneticJen/status/897153736669356032" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/GeneticJen/status/897153736669356032</a>