Back in the ancient mists of time, scientists and mathematicians would circulate preprints of their articles among friends and colleagues via the postal service, as a courtesy, to get feedback and to try to make sure people in the community were aware of their forthcoming work.  As the wikipedia entry says, with the advent of widespread LaTeX and the development of the web, Paul Ginsparg (then at LANL) put together an html-based site for electronic sharing of preprints, initially at xxx.lanl.gov (back before "xxx" in URLs was the kind of thing filtered and blocked by employers).   In 2001 he moved to Cornell, and by then the lab was perhaps relieved to see the site, rebranded as the arXiv, shift to Cornell's library/repository infrastructure.   PIs my age remember (fondly? maybe?) the old days of the arXiv, when Prof. Ginsparg's rather dry sense of humor pervaded the site.  The skull-and-crossbones logo.  The "help"/FAQ pages that basically said, "if you can't figure out how to .tar.gz all of your necessary LaTeX files, and you can't figure out how to make your .eps figures small, maybe you should reconsider whether you're smart enough to be sharing your ideas here".  The arXiv was for preprints, without peer review (though interesting follow-on sites like Scirate now exist for organized commenting on the articles). From these modest beginnings, the arXiv has grown enormously, including imitators/spin-offs such as chemrxiv and biorXiv and socarXiv.  The arXiv has recently become an independent nonprofit, hired a CEO, secured multiyear philanthropic support, and hosts over 3 million articles.  It's been interesting seeing some level of complaints online about some of these steps, but when the audience is so large, not everyone is going to be happy.  Rapid growth has been a major issue - see here for a graph of monthly submissions: The exponential rise (except for a slight pandemic-correlated shoulder) has been problematic, especially recently.  One hallmark of the arXiv over the years has been its ability to function with comparatively minimal need for "moderation".  Early on, one consequence of the minimalistic help and moderate technical entry barrier was that it was unusual for fringe/pseudoscience to make its way onto the server.  (Hence the establishment of viXra.)  With the ease of cranking out properly formatted readable manuscripts using AI, clearly the arXiv has been struggling.  If 10-15% of submissions need some kind of human intervention or review, the support needs are rapidly outpacing the limited count of support staff.  There can be substantial backlogs.  To help deal with this, the arXiv recently updated its policies regarding AI-generated content (and AI cannot be a co-author, because the AI tools cannot take responsibility for content), and most recently has had to limit submission rates to two papers per month per submitting author.  These moves, too, have drawn some criticism (e.g. here).  Personally, I think the operators of the arXiv face an incredibly challenging environment and are doing the best they can - the idea that they are making moves because they are establishment sticks in the mud who don't understand the New Way of Doing Science is just wrong-headed. It's completely unclear where all this is heading.  Exponential growth in nature signals instability and does not continue forever. If proponents of very heavily AI-driven research want to establish a repository specifically for that work, that's up to them.  [It is very on brand for the hard core AI advocates to argue that the arXiv is somehow morally obligated to host everything (regardless of hardware or personnel costs) so that future AI tools can read everything (a repository growing too quickly for human researchers to keep up) and summarize it.] One overarching point that should come up in any arXiv discussion: The arXiv has become a global repository for an enormous amount of human knowledge, without charging anyone publication fees.  This should make interested parties think reallllllly hard about economic models of for-profit publishers.

Is philosophy real? We sent our correspondent to find out.

Stephen J Gould (still my favorite science essayist) wrote an excellent article in 1985 (Red Wings in the Sunset, later published in his book, Bully for Brontosaurus) about artist and naturalist Abbott Handerson Thayer. Thayer wrote about how animals use coloration as camouflage – what he called “cryptic coloration”. His ideas were solid, but he made a classic mistake that scientists sometimes make, overapplying their key discovery. Thayer argued that all animal coloration is cryptic. For example, he argued that flamingos are pink because it hides them in the setting sun (hence the title of the essay). This is a transparently absurd argument, and it shows how Thayer tried to shoehorn all evidence into his preferred and absolute narrative. It is better to assume that nature is complex, and all explanations are at best partial (unless proven otherwise). Animal coloration, in fact, can serve many different purposes, only one of which is camouflage. Thayer also struggled with the male peacock, for example. Butterflies appear to be another example. Actually, many butterflies are camouflaged on the underside of their wings, so that when they are at rest with their wings up they tend to blend into their surroundings. But the top side of their wings are often very colorful and not camouflaged at all. One assumption is that the brightly colored part of their wings is to attract mates. This may be true, but that does not mean the coloration does not serve another function. Often animals use visual cues when choosing their mates that are markers for health and success. As evidence that butterfly wing color may be serving a survival benefit, if you look at birds that feed on insects during flight, they target dully-colored moths much more than brightly colored butterflies, even though the butterflies should be easier to see. A recent study tests the hypothesis that the brightly colored and patterned top side of butterfly wings may have evolved to produce an optical illusion to confuse predators. The idea of using optical illusions as visual protection in animals is not new. For example, zebra stripes allow zebras to hide in the herd, confusing predators as to where one zebra ends and another begins. Stripes on zebras and snakes may also serve to confuses predators about their direction of motion, but this hypothesis has not been tested previously. The researchers started by filming butterflies taking off using high speed cameras. They found that the wing patterns created a powerful “barber pole” illusion. The stripes on a barber pole look like they are moving up or town even when the pole is just spinning. Similarly, the wing patterns combined with the way butterflies move their wings and their flight dynamics combine to create a similar barber pole illusion, making the butterfly look like it is moving down when it is in fact moving up. They also showed that this strategy is phylogenetically widespread. They then did modeling in silico and showed digital creatures converge on butterfly-like patterns. To understand how effective this strategy can be it’s important to understand how catching a butterfly in midflight works. Butterflies have a very jumpy pattern of flight. In order to grab them in flight, a bird will have to zero in on their exact location with a few hundred millisecond and millimeter precision. If the butterfly suddenly zigs while the bird perceives that they zagged, the birdy will miss. Alternatively they may make only a glancing blow or grab an edge of a wing rather than their body. Either way, the butterfly lives another day and the bird goes hungry. In zebras this effect has been referred to as the “visual dazzle” strategy. Now there is some empiric evidence that this works not just by confusing predators, but by creating a specific optical illusion. Zebras will also zig-zag to evade predators, and misjudging that last second movement can cause a pouncing lioness to miss. There are two specific illusion effects at work – the aperture effect and spatiotemporal aliasing. The aperture effect refers to the brain’s processing of visual information through a limited field of view. The visual system has a hard time processing many moving stripes, and specifically will confuse the direction of movement (this is the barber pole effect). So a predator may miss a zebra’s vertical movement, for example, and perceive all movement as perpendicular to the stripes. They may also misinterpret the angle of movement and only perceive the perpendicular motion. Spatiotemporal aliasing has to do with ratio of the movement with the “refresh” speed of the brain’s visual processing. You have likely seen this with spinning wheels that have spoke-like features. As the wheel slows down, at one point the spinning will appear to stop completely, and then will appear to spin backwards. This is simply an artifact of your brain’s visual processing speed. Now imagine being surrounded by a field of rapidly moving and zig-zagging stripes, and your brain trying to make sense of all this information, while trying to compensate for these powerful optical illusions. Butterflies don’t have a herd to hide in, but they do have the added element of their flapping wings. Not only are they moving in a way to maximize these optical illusions, their wings are also doing this, while alternating top-side and bottom-side. Some butterflies have bright spots on their colorful upper wings, that will flash as they flap their wings, causing another type of dazzling disorientation. I will end by returning to my original point – do not be limited in the types of explanations that you reach for when trying to understand nature. Nature is not so limited. Animals do not just use coloration for camouflage and attracting mates. They can also use their coloring for thermoregulation, for mimicking other animals, for producing a danger-signal to would-be predators, and to communicate with other members of their species. It can communicate mood, danger, or social status. Now we have to add optical illusions to the list. There may be other strategies yet to be discovered or imagined. The post Butterflies Are Masters of Illusion first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

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