This is a little off the liberal arts path, but it’s always good to use ideas from other fields in our teaching, right? So here’s my question: if it looks like a butterfly and flies like a butterfly and contributes to the environment like a butterfly by pollinating…then why isn’t it a butterfly?

The Smithsonian Institute say the the fossilized Oregramma Illecebrosa is an example of convergent evolution, “the emergence in unrelated groups of similar bodies.”

But isn’t a cigar sometimes just a cigar?

Discuss.

From The Economist, Feb. 6-12, 2016, pg. 74.