Life imperfectly imitates life

摘要

One hundred and fifty years ago, the English naturalist Henry Walter Bates discovered a phenomenon that he regarded as "a most powerful proof of the theory of natural selection". Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, who had proposed natural selection as the engine of evolution only a few years earlier, agreed. Indeed, Darwin considered Bates's manuscript to be "one of the most remarkable and admirable papers I ever read". Bates had uncovered a spectacular type of adaptation, now known as Batesian mimicry, in which a species (the mimic) that is edible to predators evolves to resemble a conspicuous, inedible species (the model) that predators avoid.