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More than 160 years after Charles Darwin unveiled his theory of evolution, another of his ideas finally took off – an explanation of why some insects gave up flight.
About 5% of insect species evolved to fly only to lose their ability. In one habitat type, however, the proportion is much higher: islands. There, flies are more likely to crawl and moths mingle.
For Darwin, the obvious explanation lay in the danger of taking off when you couldn’t be sure of returning to dry land. Write in About the origin of species in 1859 he cited an inventory of Madeira beetles, which showed that 200 of the 550 known species were unable to fly.
“Each
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