Another of Darwin’s correspondents, zoologist Fritz Müller, recognized the principle operating in this situation-that there is an advantage to be gained if different species pool their mimetic resources. Forbes then retells the story of the discovery of natural selection by Darwin and Wallace, giving an account of communications among the three naturalists and explicating their views on mimicry as they developed.īates noticed that it wasn’t just the defenseless species that mimicked the unpalatable ones-unpalatable species mimicked each other. Peter Forbes’s Dazzled and Deceived, which is both a natural history and a cultural history of mimicry and camouflage, opens with a description of Bates’s travels in the Amazon with Alfred Russel Wallace in 1848. This process, now known as Batesian mimicry, confers a selective advantage as long as the mimicking species remains scarcer than its model. He theorized that defenseless species gained protection from potential predators by taking on the pattern and coloration of another species that has some sort of defense-a quality that makes it inedible, perhaps-for which its appearance serves as a warning. Bates, who had spent much more time than Darwin in the Amazon, had noticed that butterflies of different lineages often exhibit almost indistinguishable color patterns. So he was receptive when Henry Walter Bates initiated a correspondence shortly after the Origin appeared. But he believed that natural selection, if correct, would be universally applicable, and he sought explanations for any apparent exceptions. Charles Darwin had little to say about this paradox in On the Origin of Species.
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