Müllerian mimicry
Army ants follow each other’s pheromone trails to know where to go. Sometimes, they accidentally form a loop, or “ant mill”, circularly following each other until they die of exhaustion:
substack.com • 25 Useful Ideas for 2025
Physician Joachim Richter and psychologist Roya Ostovar have speculated that early humans might have developed synchronized movement as a defense tactic, to “delude a predator by producing the impression of being a homogeneous enormous animal which would be too powerful to attack.” This idea is not so farfetched. Many species deploy strategies of s
... See moreKelly McGonigal • The Joy of Movement: How exercise helps us find happiness, hope, connection, and courage
Species tend to adapt to their surroundings in order to survive, given the combination of their genetics and their environment – an always-unavoidable combination. However, adaptations made in an individual’s lifetime are not passed down genetically, as was once thought: Populations of species adapt through the process of evolution by natural selec... See more
authority • Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions
therefore my guess is that the easiest way to signal across such a gap with hard-to-forge patterns designed to be recognized by hard-to-emulate pattern-matching algorithms is to use objective standards of beauty. So flowers have to create objective beauty, and insects have to recognize objective beauty.
David Deutsch • The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
For example, the hover fly has evolved yellow and black stripes, making it look like a wasp, which triggers the wasp-avoidance module in some birds that would otherwise enjoy eating hover flies.