Conclusions

Jean Wahl

pp. 137-138

in: Timo Maran, Mimicry and meaning, Berlin, Springer, 2017

Abstract

Mimicry studies in biology have a long history, and they are conceptually related to the understandings of mimesis and imitation in human culture that reach back much farther. Acknowledging this background, I have approached mimicry in this book simultaneously as a cultural-scientific construct and as a real phenomenon, that is, as a result of semiotic activities of the participants of the mimicry system. Thus my analysis has two reference points: the mimicry concept as it is recognised and conceptualised in modern biology, and mimicry as a confusing communicative encounter in the Umwelten of the participants. A central theoretical model of mimicry in biology is the tripartite mimicry model that includes definite mimic, model and receiver species. This is a coarse simplification of the diversity of real mimicry cases in nature, but it is also a useful heuristic or modelling device that helps explicate the structural properties of mimicry and carry out a comparative study of different mimicry cases in nature. At the same time, the triadic mimicry model conveys a bias of contemporary evolutionary biology that focuses on species and their genetic heritability and largely ignores any non-tangible relations in nature; that is, the organism's knowledge, cultural traditions of populations, and semiotic relations between different species.