Animals

Animal Examples of Deception

In 1862, the English naturalist Henry W. Bates published in the Transactions of the Linnean Society the results of the research that he had conducted on butterflies from the forests of Brazil. According to German scientist Wolfgang Wickler, the conclusions drawn by Bates stimulated heated discussion for the next 100 years, not only among scientists but also among philosophers, theologians, and teachers. The reason for such interest was that Bates had in fact pointed out a particular phenomenon that would later receive the term Batesian mimicry in his honor. Having observed that the palatable Pierid butterflies pretended to be the unpalatable Heliconids, Bates came to the conclusion that animals could act a part. Wickler notes, “An actor is a mime, and so the representation of a false warning pattern was called mimicry.”

In another attempt to classify the varying degrees of deception, scholar Robert Mitchell proposes a hierarchy describing subsumptive levels of deception, and lists six levels of increasing complexity creating different forms of deception. While the first level involves evolution, selection, morphogenesis, and registration by the victim, the second level calls for registration of the deceiver coordinated with actions of the victim. The third level, call for learning and memory, with the fourth calling for pretense, conscious thought, and imaginative planning. More complex, the fifth level takes the other's perspective, and the sixth level recognizes the other's perspective on the self's perspective.

[Page 23]Several different forms and levels of complexity of deception are practiced by animals. These levels may distinguish simpler processes from more complex quasihuman behavioral patterns. The problem with this distinction is that the adjective simple runs the risk of diminishing the fact that any mimetic or deceptive analogy involves the origin of all species and all adaptation.

Insects

Insects are exemplary of the first two levels of deception, although some performances on the part of insects, such as pretending to be something they are not, could very well fall under the third level of deception. Butterfly deception would fall under Mitchell's first two levels because they implicate camouflage and mimicry, but these first two levels differ when it comes to the involvement of the agent. As Mitchell states, “At the first level are simulations, produced through selection, evolution, and morphogenesis, which were selected for their resemblance, from the victim's perspective, to things that have special relevance (mimicry) to no relevance (camouflage) to the victim.”

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