Repeating Patterns of Mimicry

F ascination with fl ora and fauna usually starts early in life as an all-encompassing childhood pastime. Growing up in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, I developed an affi nity for natural history as a child, inspired by famous television naturalists, such as Jacques Cousteau and Bernhard Grzimek, as well as by role models closer to home. As a child, it seemed quite natural to observe, experiment with, and collect all kinds of animals, dead or alive, and their parts (beetles, butterfl ies, fi sh, amphibians, antlers, and skulls) for my private " Wunderkammer, " or cabinet of curiosities. Literature Nobel laureate Vladimir Nabokov, probably most famous for his notorious novel Lolita, was also a distinguished lepidopterist who specialized in the systematics of the butterfl y family Lycaenidae. Nabokov's obsession with butterfl ies also started early in life and arguably infl uenced his thinking and writing for the rest of it. He published numerous scholarly papers in recognized entomology journals, mostly on species from Europe and North America, and he was inordinately proud that a species of butterfl y (Cyllopsis pyracmon nabokovi) was named after him. Nabokov was particularly fascinated by the mapping of spots on butterfl y wings. The diversity of life, both within and between species, often lights the fi re of childhood fascination, fostering a naïve juvenile obsession and the desire to collect. But as one becomes more familiar with the natural world, one also notices curious similarities between organisms. This similarity might simply, and rather uninterestingly, be a refl ection of close evolutionary relationships. But more intriguing evolutionary questions and lessons emerge when the similarity exists between distantly related species. Convergence, the term used to describe this type of similarity, is arguably more interesting than plain diversity. The paleontologist Simon Conway Morris [1] has made convergence his main theme, because it not only highlights the power of natural selection but also helps to identify other mechanisms of evolution that will constrain and canalize the possibilities of diversity into a reduced subset of similar evolutionary outcomes. How phenotypic diversity is constrained by genetics or development, and more specifi cally, what underlying processes determine phenotypic outcomes are exciting questions that the nascent fi eld of evolutionary developmental biology addresses. Convergence teaches us that the seemingly unbounded creativity of evolution through natural selection and the diversity it produces are not without limits but sometimes seem to follow predictable …