Rethinking Bad Taste

How much mimicry is outright cheating?

Talking to evolutionary biologists Hannah Rowland and Mike Speed can shake your faith in a supposedly settled area of science. Generations of textbooks have presented animal mimicry as one of the marvels of evolution, allowing two species to confound their predators by looking alike. Marvel of evolution it is, but surprisingly for such a high-profile example, researchers still have a lot of questions about how mimicry works.