Creationist Silliness: The Dirty Dozen

In a wild deviation from the norm, I'm not going to attack today's question with hyperbolic snark an ad hominems.

Yes, you read that right.

The more I stare at this question, the less I feel the need to seethe and be flamboyantly acerbic. I think it's because the young lady pictured doesn't have a vapid, "ignorance is bliss" look in her eye, or a smug "go ahead and answer that one" smirk. She looks like a thirteen year old on a class trip who genuinely wants to know, "does metamorphosis help support evolution?"

As inclined as I am to simply say "Yes. NEXT!" I feel compelled to provide an actual answer. It's as if this child is actually, legitimately seeking information, and it would be calloused and irresponsible not to provide it. After all, isn't that what science is about?

Yes. Metamorphosis does, in fact, help support evolution.

Part of the basis for biological evolution is the ability for a species to adapt and survive. If, for instance, you take butterflies as a crude example; they start out as caterpillars, or larvae (yes, I know they start out as eggs, but that has naught to do with the point of metamorphosis that I'm trying to make here, thank you very much, Bib), before pupating and metamorphosing into butterflies. This increases the likelihood of survival of the species as a whole, because (to put it very simply) an increase in the environments in which an animal can survive exponentially increases that animal's chances of survival. monarch caterpillars (to use a specific example) have a much more limited range than their adult butterfly counterparts. While the larvae are typically limited to the area of a few plants in a field, after metamorphosing into the fully grown monarch butterfly, they migrate...

...Up to six thousand miles...

How's that for broadening your horizons?

Where I feel you may be hung up here, is in assuming that evolution can be studied on what amounts to a microscopic scale, and while the mechanisms are similar, that isn't the case. Evolution isn't changing and adaptation over the course of an animal's lifetime, or even the course of a generation or two. It's a fundamental, biological adaptation of a species over a much more grandiose timescale. Think millennial. It's a very, very, VERY slow process, and while the same mechanisms can be observed on a psychological level (think in terms of seagulls transition from primarily oceanic scavengers to primarily aggressive, boardwalk-dwelling vermin that hunt funnel cake in just the past few decades), actual biological evolution is a process that takes place over several hundred, (or even thousand) generations. It's a macroscopic phenomenon, not a microscopic one (generally).

Metamorphosis can be thought of simply as a much more dramatic form of puberty. All it is is the transition from juvenile of a species to adult of the same species. Girls become women (sometimes), boys become men (on occasion), tadpoles become frogs, and caterpillars become butterflies. And it's all for the same primal purpose:

Sex.

But that's a discussion I'll let your parents handle.