Introduction to Signs and Communication in Mimicry
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Introduction to Signs and Communication in Mimicry Karel Kleisner 1
& Timo
Maran 2
Received: 5 March 2019 / Accepted: 18 March 2019/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Why dedicate a special issue of Biosemiotics to mimicry? Is there anything new one could say about mimicry that was not said elsewhere? Given the size of mimicry studies, one could argue that almost everything worth saying has been already said. But in some cases, it was a long time ago, in other cases, it was overshadowed by the mainstream opinions of the day, and yet other insights just slipped through the cracks because their authors were outsiders to the world of ‘big science.’ Biosemiotics, a discipline that studies sign systems and meaning production in the living world, approaches the phenomenon of mimicry in part by analysing iconic signs (where a sign refers to its object because of mutual resemblance) and by emphasising the intentionality of semiosis and interspecies semiotic relations. Biosemiotics thus provides a fresh approach to the study and analysis of mimicry by highlighting the communicative and meaning-laden aspects of such deceptive similarities. The goal of this special issue is thus to advance a semiotic and communicative approach to the interpretation of mimicry, an approach which we believe has relevance to both a biological theory of mimicry and to general biosemiotic theory. The study of biological mimicry has a long and distinguished history in biology, starting with its use as an argument in support of Darwinian theory of evolution. Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Walter Bates realised that some butterfly coloration might be adaptive because of its resemblance to other lepidopteran species. Bates suggested that this resemblance can best be explained by natural selection (Bates 1862: 512). Mimicry thus came to be viewed in modern times as a convincing instantiation of the creative powers of natural selection. Such mimicry has traditionally been viewed as a system of three parts, where the mimic or imitator organism takes on appearance of the model organism, which is usually protective, and the mimic’s taxonomic identity is therefore misinterpreted by
* Karel Kleisner [email protected] Timo Maran [email protected]
1
Department of Philosophy and History of Science, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
2
Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia
Kleisner K., Maran T.
the perceiver (usually a predator). In short, the mimic acquires an evolutionary advantage by adopting the appearance of a protected model. This classical setup is known as Batesian mimicry. From the perspective of the current Special Issue, it is, however, interesting to note that this classical tripartite mimicry system, consisting of a mimic, a model, and a perceiver, can also be viewed as a communicative setup. Mimicry as a communication system includes ‘a communicative relationship between the model and the receiver as a resemblance-based relation between the model and the mimic, and as a deceptive relation between the
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