One of the things I most enjoy about Mark Avery’s Sunday book reviews is his coverage in them of books that don’t always make it across the Atlantic. Such is the case once again with his review this week of Prof. Philip Howse’s “Bee Tiger; The Death’s Head Hawk-moth Through the Looking-glass” from Brambleby Books.
What with all the museums having been closed for so long now (don’t even remind me of the Humboldt exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum that never even opened…), I was very pleased to be graced with the arrival recently of a new book from Smithsonian Books that is essentially a museum exhibition of Henry Walter Bates’ journals from his Amazon explorations in the mid Nineteen Century presented in printed and bound form.
If you’ve studied natural history for very long, you’ve likely by now noticed that a wide variety of plants and animals have the appearance of things much different than what they themselves actually are; caterpillars that look like snakes or hoverflies that look like bees, for example. While it’s fairly obvious that such deceptive traits would be valuable for a range of reasons, how did they come about in the first place? And for that matter, what do such deceptions mean in regard to evolution and adaptation?