In the 1800s, a conflict between the founding fathers of evolution divided the community. Charles Darwin believed sexual selection drove the variation in butterfly colors and patterns of males, while contemporary rival Alfred Russel Wallace disagreed, predicting that broader natural selection played as important a role.
In 2024, 150 years or so after these two iconic British evolutionary scientists began their heated rivalry over who was right, researchers have employed machine learning to settle the score. Scientists from the University of Essex, in collaboration with the Natural History Museum and AI research institute Cross Labs, Cross Compass, have used AI to analyze “sexual and interspecific variation” found across 16,734 dorsal and ventral images of birdwing butterflies.
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What they found was that, well, Darwin and Wallace were both correct in their predictions. The data suggests that while mate selection does drive changes in male butterfly appearance, changes observed in females over time indicate it’s not all about sex but broader selection. The Natural History Museum’s photographs, when analyzed, revealed that while the males often have the most distinct shape and pattern shifts, both sexes contribute to diversity on a broader scale.
