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.
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Maran, T. (2017). Conclusions. In: Mimicry and Meaning: Structure and Semiotics of Biological Mimicry. Biosemiotics, vol 16. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50317-2_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50317-2_12
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Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-50315-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-50317-2
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