The story of the research of butterfly wings

Do you like butterfly? If the answer is yes, please read this story.
Earlier this century, scientists recognized that each butterfly wing pattern is a variation on a common theme. Every design is a composite of several discrete elements--spots, stripes, and borders--whose relative positions on the wing remain largely constant, even though the size, shape, color, and number of these elements vary independently of one another. Some of the thousands of living butterfly species--swallowtails, for example sport a rich assortment of design elements on their wings. Others--such as the sulphurs--have just a few. Butterfly wing markings have many functions, such as camouflage, mimicry, and perhaps attracting a mate. The role of eyespots appears to be to deceive predators: any bird about to snap up a juicy morsel is likely to pause when confronted by a startling flash of big "eyes" or at least to be confused and focus its attack on the wings, where damage is less serious than a direct hit on the soft body.
Every butterfly wing starts out as a flat disk of cells in the caterpillar. The disk grows during the caterpillar stage, and by the time the larva encloses itself in the chrysalis a blueprint of the future wing pattern has been drafted. Color development, however, takes place in the chrysalis. Fifteen years ago, Nijhout (butterfly expert) showed in an elegant series of microsurgery experiments that the position of eyespots in the buckeye is decided just before the caterpillar forms a chrysalis, while the colored rings around the eyespot are painted many days later, just before the adult emerges.
Using a collection of fruit fly genes as bait we can fished out corresponding genes from the thousands of genes in butterfly DNA. (Radioactively labeled fly genes can be used to locate and isolate their counterparts from butterfly DNA.) Finding a gene, however, is not the same as demonstrating its function. Using molecular probes marked with fluorescent chemicals and a high-powered microscope, we next looked to see which cells glowed when the probes stuck to the disks, revealing where genes were "turned on," or activated. Genes are activated in patterns: "on" in some cells; "off" in others. These patterns of gene activity are the earliest sign in animal tissue of future morphological changes. If any of our candidate genes had a role in determining butterfly wing patterns, we hoped this technique would enable us to catch them red-handed.
what do you think in this story especially how the wing pattern use in search different type of butterfly? if you have any different opinion you can share in comments.
reference: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/is_n1_v106/ai_19318725